Salt Modern Poets
3 total works
Brian Henry’s Wings Without Birds reconfigures the quotidian, making the everyday a site for innovation and investigation. Although diverse in form, these poems continually return to explorations of family, time, selfhood, and physical space. Moving through marriage and parenthood, the house and the backyard, Henry’s poems consider ways of being simultaneously singular and plural. Although known for having a dark and satirical sensibility, he brings compassion and self-deprecating humor to Wings Without Birds, delving into what binds people to each other. At the center of the book, the long poem “Where We Stand Now” offers a meditative stream of quotidiana that captures both the daily and the domestic with tenderness, wit, and vigor. With other poets who have informed his aesthetic – particularly James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, and John Forbes – as the book’s presiding spirits, Henry continually explores how to occupy a moment, how to identify “what dominates the near.”
Written during the George W. Bush era, the poems in Brother No One take their bearings from our surveillance society, where no action or transaction goes unnoticed. Everything, from vacation spots to email messages to food choice, becomes part of the surveilled tableau, and the lines between victim, bystander, and perpetrator become blurred. The CIA regulates the sun’s rising and setting, cameras lurk behind mirrors, and every human interaction becomes fodder for film. Brian Henry takes on these issues with dizzying energy, examining their effects on language, the body, perception, and the possibility of human love. Brother No One is searingly political, deeply personal, and wholly idiosyncratic.