Brooks, Brenda 1952-

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Brooks, Brenda 1952-

PERSONAL:

Born 1952, in Rivers, Manitoba, Canada. Education: York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer and poet. Worked for the Canadian Press.

MEMBER:

Writers' Union of Canada.

WRITINGS:

Somebody Should Kiss You (poetry), Gynergy Press (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada), 1990.

Blue Light in the Dash (poetry), Polestar Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1994.

Gotta Find Me an Angel (novel), Raincoast Books (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2005.

Contributor to anthologies, including By Word of Mouth, edited by Lee Fleming, Gynergy (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada), 1989; Tidelines, edited by Lee Fleming, Gynergy (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada), 1991; Tomboys!, edited by Lynne Yamaguchi and Karen Barber, Alyson Publications (Los Angeles, CA), 1995; Poems between Women: Four Centuries of Love, Romantic Friendship, and Desire, edited by Emma Donoghue, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1997; Constellations: Twenty Years of Stellar Poetry from Polestar, Polestar/Raincoast (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2001; The Dominion of Love: An Anthology of Canadian Love Poems, edited by Tom Wayman, Harbour Publishing, 2001; and In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, edited by Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve, Polestar (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2005; and The Art of Bicycling, edited by Justin Belmont, Breakaway Books, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

In her first novel, Gotta Find Me an Angel, Canadian poet Brenda Brooks presents a story about longtime mourning over the loss of a first love. The lesbian narrator is a thirty-five-year-old woman who still thinks of Madeline, who died as a teenager. Although Madeline has been dead for twenty years, the narrator has suddenly begun to sense that Madeline is with her, bringing back the narrator's sense of grief over Madeline's death, which may have been a suicide or an accident. Soon the narrator senses Madeline's ghost everywhere, from home to work to riding in the car. In the meantime, the narrator meets poet Billie Smart, and the two women soon move in together as the narrator ruminates over Billie's penchant for repeatedly watching I, Claudius late at night. Writing in Curve, Allison Steinberg noted: "Brooks' characters are realistic and whole, each cleverly crafted with a three-dimensional set of humanistic conventions and emotions." A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the novel an "unlikely but successful combination of light humor and introspection." Susan Bethany, writing in Reviewer's Bookwatch, referred to Gotta Find Me an Angel as an "imaginatively engaging story." Library Journal contributor Eleanor J. Bader called it "a compelling meditation on mourning," adding that the novel "is beautifully written, with sparks of humor and wisdom."