Crowns of Charlotte

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“Crowns of Charlotte is sweet tea and something necessarily stronger, singing, ferocious—Lee Ann Brown’s poems open forms and flora to an endless storm front. The reader finds herself (like the poet) a citizen inside, affixed to the generous field.” —Elaine Bleakney

“An autobiography ‘of human DNA’s complexity,’ of the poet and the poem from inside their own helixes, of family and place from inside individual histories, and of the war culture from inside its radiant points of departure, Crowns of Charlotte offers ‘multiple views of reality/in a single work’ to demonstrate a thesis: ‘every poem can be a new language.’ Coiled within this thesis is the poet’s perspective: ‘We are the observer photographers of our personal ages/DNAs of each others’ ways I am in the middle.’Working joyfully and elegiacally, sonically and visually, Lee Ann Brown creates poems that act as charged strands of DNA molecules ‘in time to finger to find/The new way to unwind/Skeins of sound in mind.’” —Amy Catzano

“Crowns is a 3-D spiral-ride, gravity pulling our body with the fortunes of a cast of characters of Brown’s family (maybe-less-crazy-than-Flannery O’Connor’s-citizens of-the-mind), and as the spiral we’re riding widens out into the sky we let go like a weightless game of whip-the-tail, and we fly up from mountain peaks and for moments—like breaks in the clouds—we see everything at once.” —Reverend Billy Talen