Overview

Drawer of Letters by Ricky Monahan Brown is a wry, elegiac and formally varied collection that navigates illness, grief, intimacy and reinvention with intelligence and bite. Mixing elegy, haiku, lyric fragments and metatextual play, Brown's work is steeped in literary allusion and pop-cultural residue, from Camus and Cenn Fáelad to Bowie and Yuri Gagarin. Whether charting neurotrauma, navigating relationships, or reflecting on historical ruptures and afterlives, the poems move with tonal dexterity between absurdism, lyric grace and sharp wit. This is a collection haunted by loss but sustained by imagination. Drawer of Letters is resolutely mortal, deeply felt, and formally alert.

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9781917617512

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Reviews

Drawer of Letters is a moving, personal exploration of consciousness, of the richness and complexity of life, multifaceted reflections on how it is to return, wholly changed, from the border // of passing from that life to the new life. Here are poems of love, family, the richness and complexity of life after experiencing a brain haemorrhage, a homecoming to Scotland from the USA. As Monahan Brown's existing readers would expect, these poems are written in vigorous language, deploy ancient and contemporary references and forms, and self-deprecating humour. - Jay Whittaker Drawer of Letters offers a lucid and emotionally open cartography of loss, meticulously grounded in Scottish geography, from city to coast. While the work is haunted by grief, it refuses to be defined by it, instead using grief as a foundation for radical empathy. Brown's debut is also romantic in the best, non-mawkish sense, and playful too, for example, in the wonderfully audacious 'Lady Slipper'. - Jane McKie

Author Information

Ricky Monahan Brown is a writer and poet living in Edinburgh. His memoir, Stroke: A 5% chance of survival, was a Scotsman Nonfiction Book of 2019. The spoken word event he co-founded, Interrobang?! won the 2017 Saboteur Award for Best Regular Spoken Word Night in Britain. His debut fiction collection, Terminal, was published by Sincere Corkscrew in 2024.

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