The Brass Girl Brouhaha

by Adrian Blevins

Book Overview

Winner of the prestigious Kate Tufts Award. Beginning to be adopted for reading groups nervous about poetry.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931337101
• ISBN13: 9781931337106
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Ausable Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A compilation of original free-verse poetry

Award-winning poet Adrian Blevins has penned The Brass Girl Brouhaha, a compilation of original free-verse poetry that especially reflects upon the experience of being a woman. Bits of the author's biography, the ritual and questionable rhetoric of the North American Baby Shower, and much more pour raw emotion onto the page, with no falsifying or prettying of harsh realities. "Defects of the Adolescent": Didn't she after all put herself out there like an hors d'oeuvre / on a pewter platter? / And didn't boys after all appear and hand over their smokes? // The boys would stand there with their lips trembling / until she was magically in the garden extending her wrist and / pinching off a rose stem.

Narrative Poetry Captures Life As It Is (ROANOKE TIMES REV.)

Narrative poetry captures life as it is THE BRASS GIRL BROUHAHA. By Adrian Blevins. Ausable Press. $14. Reviewed by BETH MACY This is NOT your mother's poetry - not unless your mother was someone out of the movie "The Ice Storm." It's also not the kind of dirt-dense poetry favored by the literary pinkie-waving set with all those beautiful-sounding words that seem to lead nowhere. To put it bluntly - which is the way this poet happens to put everything - Roanoke writer Adrian Blevins' first book-length poetry collection, "The Brass Girl Brouhaha," is just one helluva good read. Written in narrative form and with enough eye-popping imagery to keep the literary crowd at, say, Hollins University, on their toes, Blevins' book also appeals to those who don't know a sonnet from a sestet. We see the narrator, left as a child by her mother, suffering from a "shadow in her wake [that] was so immense . . . it fell all the way into the nineties like a fashion I saw coming, but couldn't predict." We see her mid-divorce dealing with her ex's "next girl, waiting with her hair in a blue bandanna." We see her again later, remarried, arguing with her sister's decision to put her kids in private school: "The sister said she didn't care for the grammatical errors of her less fortunate neighbors." We see Blevins, who now teaches at Roanoke College, standing in her Uncle Doc's kitchen on the day Dale Earnhardt dies, which happens to be the same day the family is burying Aunt Ann, "who died of a hard-working, charitable heart." Moments before Earnhardt's crash, there she is "writhing as only I would that the men were watching the race while the women prepared some casseroles." Blevins' vernacular sentence magic, her run-ons to beat all run-ons, and her edgy style make you feel touched, tickled, mad as hell and vindicated all at once. At last we have a poet out here in the real world living and grieving and mothering, and then getting it all down - as few people do - just exactly like it is. ** BETH MACY is a longtime features writer at The Roanoke Times.