Overview

A Little Grief Break is a thirty-year retrospective from one of contemporary poetry's most electrifying voices--a collection that refuses to sit still. Derrick C. Brown has spent three decades honing a singular poetic style that marries devastating emotional precision with sharp humor, bar-stool philosophy with literary craft, and the raw immediacy of performance with the carefully wrought architecture of the page. This 300-page collection gathers the essential poems from Brown's ten previous books alongside nineteen new works in Night Collapser, creating a portrait of a poet who has never stopped taking risks. Here are poems that detonate with laughter before breaking your heart in the next breath.

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9781949342888

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Reviews

""A Little Grief Break yokes together thirty years of dynamic work from a singular and vital poet. The poems in this collection are brimming over with voice and humor and hurt and all the rich particulars of an adventurous and attentive life. I've been mesmerized getting to witness Derrick cast these spells aloud in bars, theaters, and basements for the past fifteen years and am so grateful for this collection in which he's assembled a home for that magic from a language we all share."" - Sam Sax, author of PIG (Scribner, 2023), and YR DEAD (McSweeney's, 2024) ""Most poets seem keen to check the ingredients on boxes or to run out of burning buildings, not Derrick Brown. Buy this book! A Little Grief Break is all charm and language and daring under flame-retardant humor, which is me saying, his tropical heart never vacations, and he sings more courageously than any newly arrived poet in hipster boots. The difference? His poems are honed, quick-witted, and settle scores only with himself. Look at how he wildly grins behind his helmet of wit, going in, flares flickering off its cracked glass.""-Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle

Author Information

Derrick C. Brown is an award-winning poet, storyteller, and president of Write Bloody Publishing. His innovative fusion of poetry and comedy earned Paste Magazine's Comedy Album of the Year (2023). The New York Times praises his work as ""a rekindling of faith in the weird, hilarious, shocking, beautiful power of words."" A formerparatrooper with the 82nd Airborne, Brown has authored ten poetry collections and four children's books, winning the Texas Book of the Year award for Poetry. He serves as the 2025/26 Poet Laureate of Los Feliz, California, and often tours via motorcycle, bringing his explosive performances to venues worldwide.

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