Embedded Files
"In Year of Morphines, Betsy Brown, faced with immense grief, creates brilliant, original poems, evoking her midwestern youth and the eventual shattering of her family. But it is her powerful images and insights that make these poems sing and stay with you. There are poems here, such as 'Dignity in the Home,' that I will never forget."
- James Tate
"A moving, merciless, and incomparably lovely collection."
- David Foster Wallace
"Allusive, edgy, smart, and utterly relentless, the poems of Year of Morphines move gracefully in the zone between our necessary morphine spells of forgetting and life's implausible reclamations: ' . . . all these stories ending with life.'"
- George Garrett, from his judge's citation
". . . a book about violence and complicated loss -- and one of the bravest books I've ever read."
- Denise Duhamel, in Painted Bride Quarterly
"Brown's poems perform a kind of miracle: bringing beauty to bear on the ugliness of dying, turning cries of grief into lyrical songs, finding comfort in painful memories. There's no sentimentality here, despite undeniable, unbearable sadness. Brown takes a hard look at the enormity of her losses and uses them to figure her life. 'I'm watching for a sign of rain / I'm repeating this planting.'"
- Joan W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study
Review
by Denise Duhamel, in Painted Bride Quarterly
National Poetry Series winner
The poems of Year of Morphines center on the history of cancer in Betsy's family: her mother and two sisters had breast cancer, and her father had pancreatic cancer. The poems pivot around the mechanisms we use in facing loss and fear -- whether those confrontations are as wrenching as a bone marrow transplant or as confused as a brief love. Published by Louisiana State University Press.
Poems from Year of Morphines:
"Rage"
Note: All royalties from Year of Morphines go to
National Breast Cancer Foundation
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