Brown, Lee Ann 1964-

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BROWN, Lee Ann 1964-

PERSONAL:

Born 1964, in Japan. Education: Brown University, B.A., M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Office—St. John's University, 101 Murray St., New York, NY 10007.

CAREER:

Educator, poet, and filmmaker. St. John's University, New York, NY, assistant professor of English; Naropa Institute, Boulder, CO, member of writing and poetics program; founder and editor of Tender Buttons Press.

AWARDS, HONORS:

New American Poetry Series Award for Polyverse.

WRITINGS:

Polyverse (poems), Sun & Moon Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1999.

The Sleep That Changed Everything (poems), Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lee Ann Brown is a poet, filmmaker, professor, and founder and editor of Tender Buttons Press. She was born in Japan but grew up in North Carolina. A contributor for Publishers Weekly considered Brown to be "the most credible candidate for Queen of the New York poetry scene" and felt that her second collection of poetry, The Sleep That Changed Everything, "should solidify her national reputation."

In her first collection of poetry, Polyverse, Brown works within many forms, styles, and voices, giving her book a sense of playfulness. She crosses boundaries to stretch forms and styles into constant reshaping and morphing. In an interview with Dannye Romine Powell for the Charlotte Observer Brown explained, "I want people to see language around them in daily conversation, on signs in the street, in popular culture as material to remake."

Her playfulness is displayed in the poem "Love," in which she takes a traditional love lyric and arranges the words to appear backward, reversed, and twisted in the first two parts. In the third part the same words read clearly, as a traditional love poem would, and the reader sees the first two parts as rearranged versions of the last. The effect is a course of confusion, from the first two parts, to clarity in the last part.

The title Polyverse suggests a celebration of "many," downplaying the concept of one big idea and one form, recognizing the many ways to arrive somewhere. Patrick Pritchett wrote in American Book Review that Brown reminds readers that "a poem, any poem, is the result of the author's collaboration with the polyphonic forces of language." To loosely tie together the three sections of Brown's collection of many, the theme of celebration of desire and pleasure runs throughout the book.

Brown again emphasizes the playfulness of language in the five sections of her second collection of poetry, The Sleep That Changed Everything. She uses a range of forms that includes prose poems, limericks, songs, ballads, and utterances. In addition to the witty, twist-and-turn on words she used in Polyverse, some of the poems use more straightforward language in this collection. She applies the straightforward style to her political poems that address the death of Matthew Sheppard, a gay teen who was beaten to death, and civil rights activist Harry Golden's idea of "vertical integration," which refers to everyone standing vertical until everyone is treated equally.

The last section of the book contains twelve poems about her grandmother's death and pays tribute to her. In the poem "Obba I Remember," Brown lists unrelated memories of her grandmother, reflecting how memory is not always coherent and orderly. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called The Sleep That Changed Everything "restorative" and "wonderfully wakeful." Ken Rumble concluded in the Electronic Poetry Review, "Brown's relentless experimentation establishes her as a poet who blazes the trails poetic trends follow, even when those trails seem to lead back into the main at times."