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Today's poem is "April Song for August"
from The Brass Girl Brouhaha

Ausable Press

Adrian Blevins was born in Abingdon, Virginia, in 1964 and holds graduate degrees from Hollins University and Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers. A 2002 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation award for poetry and the author of The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, a Bright Hill Press award-winning chapbook, Blevins lives in Roanoke, Virginia, with her husband and three children. She teaches at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.

About The Brass Girl Brouhaha:

"Sex is in here. Mortality too, with all the incremental wounds to self-love and dignity that sex and mortality entail. And motherhood, square root of all the rest, is here, so stripped of every piety it steams. And spooling through this gorgeous, brassy brouhaha, the freshest poetic line that America has produced in thirty years.

I don't know where she got it except from the gods and from plenty of god-inspired hard work, but Adrian Blevins' perfect gift for timing is plain magic on the page.

Blevins has harnessed the vernacular sentence—the one great underused resource in our national repository—and put it through paces that make the language young again. Edgy, double-timing, favoring the feint and swerve, she plays the momentums of slang and syntax, run-on and compression for all they're worth. And in expert hands like these, they're worth nearly everything: these poems remind us how smart the language can be on our behalf. We've needed this book; it comes not a minute too soon. Blevins' spirited demotic is a thinking machine."
—Linda Gregerson



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