Natural Causes

"In one wonderfully crafted narrative after another, the poems of Natural Causes address loss: of human memory, of life, of sanity, and of the connection to our world as we grow into old age (and eventually die). While it’s perfectly fair to call these poems prosy, this is the first, most obvious observation one should make, and the underlying negativity of the term prosy when applied to verse exists in these poems purely for the fact that, yes, they are narrative; yes, they tell stories—not that they are flawed in some essential way. The second (and more worthy) observation a reader should make of these poems is how deftly Brodeur utilizes sound, meter, figurative language, and other more traditional poetic devices to spin these yarns in a way more akin to sermons, more akin to music, than to 'stories with line breaks.'" —Southern Indiana Review

"Brian Brodeur’s poems embrace our shadowed selves—human frailty, ignorance, even the grotesque. In Natural Causes, he reminds his readers that what we hold dear—each other, animals, the planet—is often perilously close to violence and loss… an astute and valiant book, brimming with humanity." —Denise Duhamel