Apprentice to a Breathing Hand [Paperback]

Poetry that considers how we live with constant shifts, positioning alchemy as an example of endless change.
 
The poetry of Laynie Browne’sApprentice to a Breathing Handexplores alchemy, connectivity, and perception. Throughout the collection, Browne considers the formation and limits of personhood, the experience of a body moving through time, and the imperative to continually learn and unlearn. Browne looks to alchemy as a practice for cultivating the impossible, positioning it as a fitting model for our current moment. In the material of language, meaning must be unmade and remade endlessly, and in this continual regeneration, Browne considers the alchemy of how a poem can in turn transform the poet. Moving through methods of making and unmaking, the collection centers on the figure of an apprentice working in a space of indeterminacy, lack, breath, and constant shifting.
 Laynie Browneis the author of seventeen collections of poems, three novels, and a book of short fiction. Her recent books of poetry includeIntaglio Daughters,Practice Has No Sequel,Letters Inscribed in Snow, andTranslation of the Lilies Back into Lists. She coeditedI’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Womenand editedA Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel. Her work has appeared in publications includingConjunctions,A Public Space,New American Writing,BrooklynRail, and in anthologies includingThe Ecopoetry Anthology,The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, andPostmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Honors include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award. She teaches creative writing and coordinates the MOOC Modern Poetry at the University of Pennsylvania.