Chapbook, published by Finishing Line Press, 2008; available from author.
From the back cover: Writing persona poems has taught Polly Brown that you can’t write in other people’s voices without giving yourself away, that you lie in order to tell the truth even when you’re writing as your own narrator, and that life and story (in all their forms) need each other.
Praise from Susan Donnelly, author of Transit and The Maureen Papers: There is Anneliese, who discovers she is the child of Holocaust victims; the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose bravery folds grief “small/ into every stanza”; Ned Chapman, enduring as the rocks on his farm; the unnamed subjects of Eudora Welty’s Mississippi photographs…This is a beautiful and instructive book.
“Home after High Water / Rodney,” by Polly Brown, as it appears in Each Thing Torn From Any of Us. Written in response to one of Eudora Welty’s photographs of Mississippi taken during the 1930s, in the book One Time One Place. This poem, like the others in a series of five, takes the title of the photo, in which the last part is the name of a place.
Home after High Water / Rodney, read by Polly Brown
Part ii from a longer poem, “Midnight”
Polly Brown / Poet 