The Brass Girl Brouhaha [Paperback]

Adrian Blevins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2003

Winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for a first book of poetry. In wild, zany, often hilarious language, this poet writes about what it’s like to be a woman, a mother, a wife, an ex-wife and a poet in 21st century America. Linda Gregerson has commented that Blevins writes “the freshest poetic line that America has produced in 30 years.”

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Poetry lovers, this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edirifed real thang." -- Tony Hoagland

"To put it bluntly-which is the way this poet happens to put everything...just one helluva good read." -- Roanoke Times, October 14,2003

Blevins speaks a certain truth about life's brutality and beauty...that becomes a universal story which must be told. -- The Cafe' Review

These are poems that shine and hum, that dazzle and crow. -- Newpages.com

Review

"To put it bluntly-which is the way this poet happens to put everything...just one helluva good read."

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Ausable Press (September 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931337101
• ISBN-13: 978-1931337106
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #888,631 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Narrative Poetry Captures Life As It Is (ROANOKE TIMES REV.), October 14, 2003

By 

Beth Macy - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Brass Girl Brouhaha (Kate Tufts Discovery Award) (Hardcover)

Narrative poetry captures life as it is THE BRASS GIRL BROUHAHA. By Adrian Blevins. Ausable Press. $14. Reviewed by BETH MACY This is NOT your mother's poetry - not unless your mother was someone out of the movie "The Ice Storm." It's also not the kind of dirt-dense poetry favored by the literary pinkie-waving set with all those beautiful-sounding words that seem to lead nowhere. To put it bluntly - which is the way this poet happens to put everything - Roanoke writer Adrian Blevins' first book-length poetry collection, "The Brass Girl Brouhaha," is just one helluva good read. Written in narrative form and with enough eye-popping imagery to keep the literary crowd at, say, Hollins University, on their toes, Blevins' book also appeals to those who don't know a sonnet from a sestet. We see the narrator, left as a child by her mother, suffering from a "shadow in her wake [that] was so immense . . . it fell all the way into the nineties like a fashion I saw coming, but couldn't predict." We see her mid-divorce dealing with her ex's "next girl, waiting with her hair in a blue bandanna." We see her again later, remarried, arguing with her sister's decision to put her kids in private school: "The sister said she didn't care for the grammatical errors of her less fortunate neighbors." We see Blevins, who now teaches at Roanoke College, standing in her Uncle Doc's kitchen on the day Dale Earnhardt dies, which happens to be the same day the family is burying Aunt Ann, "who died of a hard-working, charitable heart." Moments before Earnhardt's crash, there she is "writhing as only I would that the men were watching the race while the women prepared some casseroles." Blevins' vernacular sentence magic, her run-ons to beat all run-ons, and her edgy style make you feel touched, tickled, mad as hell and vindicated all at once. At last we have a poet out here in the real world living and grieving and mothering, and then getting it all down - as few people do - just exactly like it is. *''* BETH MACY is a longtime features writer at The Roanoke Times.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A compilation of original free-verse poetry, November 8, 2004

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Brass Girl Brouhaha (Paperback)

Award-winning poet Adrian Blevins has penned The Brass Girl Brouhaha, a compilation of original free-verse poetry that especially reflects upon the experience of being a woman. Bits of the author's biography, the ritual and questionable rhetoric of the North American Baby Shower, and much more pour raw emotion onto the page, with no falsifying or prettying of harsh realities. "Defects of the Adolescent": Didn't she after all put herself out there like an hors d'oeuvre / on a pewter platter? / And didn't boys after all appear and hand over their smokes? // The boys would stand there with their lips trembling / until she was magically in the garden extending her wrist and / pinching off a rose stem.