The twentieth anniversary of 9/11/2001 sees Andrea Carter Brown gathering her work into one devastating bouquet of terror, survival, grief, and recovery. From stark moment-to-moment narrative of the flight from her apartment one block from the Towers, through the poems of loss and recovery, her honesty refuses simple answers and refuses to prettify. Bracketed by poems that celebrate the beauty of New York and of the life that followed, Brown pulls us through the arteries of trauma to a wise and astonished consciousness of what it means to heal. To sing again.
Writes Martha Collins, “A more haunting memorial to 9/11 than this book will be hard to find. Following a lyrical prelude that highlights the nearby Hudson River, the long prose poem of the title follows Andrea Carter Brown as she witnesses and flees from the Trade Center attacks. The generous use of descriptive and narrative detail that makes these poems so memorable carries into elegy and aftermath, and finally into a landscape filled, like the opening poems, with quiet beauty. Reading September 12 is a wrenching but restorative experience you won’t soon forget.”
“I have just finished reading September 12 for the third time. It’s the best book of poetry I’ve ever read. It is absolutely brilliant,” writes Mary Mackey, author of The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams and winner of the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press.
Poems from September 12 have been honored with the James Dickey Prize from Five Points, River Styx International Poetry Prize, and the National Poet Hunt from The MacGuffin. The poem “The Old Neighborhood” was featured on NPR and cited in the Library of Congress Online Guide to the Poetry of 9/11. Split This Rock, an organization recognizing poetry that bears witness to injustice, also featured “After the Disaster: Fragments.”
Andrea Carter Brown’s work has inspired readers and listeners, often strangers, to share their own stories of September 11: where they were, what happened to them, how they heard the news. “I won’t say it’s been easy,” Andrea Carter Brown in a guest article for Five Points. “It’s been a long, slow, ongoing process of discovery. And recovery.”
Please join us in congratulating Andrea Carter Brown on this achievement of twenty years’ work. September 12 can be ordered at Small Press Distribution, direct from the press, through Ingram, and on Amazon. Please support nonprofit distributors who do so much to keep the small press world thriving.
Listen to Poems on Air
Los Angeles Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson reads Andrea Carter Brown’s poem “The Rock in the Glen.”