Poem of the Week: Andrea Carter Brown

After the Disaster: Fragments

We are not starving.

........We are wearing

shoes on our feet.

........We have friends

to care for us; a roof

........albeit borrowed,

over our heads. We are

........husbands, wives

still; lovers, parents, children.

...............But the dust

of thousands has settled

..........over our living

rooms, an early snow

....fall, in late summer,

the first winter

........of the rest of our lives.

-Andrea Carter Brown

Used by permission.

Previously published in The MacGuffin.

Andrea Carter Brown is the author of a collection of poems, The Disheveled Bed (CavanKerry Press, 2006), and an award-winning poetry chapbook, Brook & Rainbow (Sow's Ear Press, 2000). Each Boat Signs the Water, her second poetry chapbook, won the 2010 Pudding House Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2011, together with a letterpress broadside of the title poem. She is completing a collection of linked heroic double sonnet crowns titled September 12. A longtime resident of New York City, where she was a Founding Editor of Barrow Street, she now lives in Los Angeles, where she has been Visiting Lecturer in Poetry and Managing Editor of the Emily Dickinson Journal at Pomona College.

Brown was on the panel Personal and Political: The Difficult Art of Writing a Manuscript of Poems that Bear Witness at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2008, and The Poet as Historian in the 21st Century: A Rare Opportunity in Difficult Times at Split This Rock 2010. She will present on the panel The Legacy of 9/11: Poetry Ten Years Later at Split This Rock 2012.

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