Domestic Interior

Stephanie Brown is one of my favorite poets. There's something lethally, courageously blunt in her poems. We sense the speaker is tangled in circumstances she can't control, but, like an anthropologist being crushed in the coils of a python, she is still able to comment in the most incisive, satirical, and empathetic ways on the behavior of the creature. Unafraid of naming the ugliness and compromise of human relationships, Brown's tonal palette is a unique hybrid of zany, tragic, sociological, and vengeful. Her star is stationed somewhere in the quadrant of Sylvia Plath and Ann Carson, and it throbs with its own distinctive human brightness. - Tony Hoagland ""This book is the real Desperate Housewives. It is the opposite of Oprah. It's what happens after everyone else has clicked their remotes. More than a book about the multitude of ways in which domestic spaces can be violated, it is a survival manual written by an archival Cassandra who makes Southern California her domicile. Freud gave us his talking cure. Now after a decade comes the second installment of Stephanie Brown's reading cure. I can't quite decide if this is the most tragic comedy or the most comedic tragedy I have ever read in a volume of contemporary American verse, but one thing I do know: this book broke my heart."" - Timothy Liu ""For anyone who thinks he or she can duck our culture, our time, our circumstances, and blame the neighbor, sister, or guard, Brown will eliminate all excuses. Brown is not really judging. She is nailing us on our own actions, which we have messed up, greatly. Beneath Brown's signature incisive surface, this book creates a sublime accounting of reality."" - Jane Miller