Brandon Courtney is a veteran of the United States Navy and the author of This, Sisyphus (YesYes Books, 2019), Rooms for Rent in the Burning City (Spark Wheel Press, 2015), The Grief Muscles (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2014), and the chapbooks Improvised Devices (Thrush Press, 2009) and Inadequate Grave (YesYes Books, 2016), which won the 2017 Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Sewanee Writers' Conference, Colgate University, Juniper Summer Writers' Institute, and Seaside Writers' Conference. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Tin House, Verse Daily, Boston Review, Southeast Review, Guernica, Memorious, The Progressive, and American Literary Review.

Other poems by Brandon Courtney in Verse Daily:
July 20, 2015:   "Mawpin" "My mother unfolds..."

Books by Brandon Courtney:

Other poems on the web by Brandon Courtney:
Three poems
Two poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Corpse Flower, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens"
Two poems

About This, Sisyphus:

"Whether wrestling God or trying to make sense and sound out of grief, Brandon Courtney's This, Sisyphus is a bright, urgent addition to the elegiac canon. My lord, folks, the language Courtney has found here interrupted me. Such a deep well of grief matched with such a high zenith of lyric, just as it should be. Written exquisitely and vulnerably, this is a book for anyone seeking to wander back towards the light after travelling through Death's valley."
—Danez Smith

"Trenchant, Achillean mourning soaks this book's extraordinary sonic terrain with its indelible weight. What more definitive shape of haunting is there, This, Sisyphus implores, than finding the beloved imbuing that one element which overwhelms the recognizable world—Ocean, contained and unappeasable in all forms conventional and nonce, carnal and inanimate. Courtney's erotic, erosive soldier's psalms enunciate the guilt of doing what one can with the awful gift of a human life in the aftermath of another's destruction, 'building a new language / from what you left inside.'"
—Justin Phillip Reed