Overview

The simultaneously searing and heartfelt poems of Kindlings compress three months of the author's life into verse. Distilled from diary entries, Kindlings opens with uncertainty but erupts in self-assurance as the poet and her family return home to Kansas over the summer of 2023. As Kindlings reveals, even amid transition, risk, and doubt, personal peace can be both sought and cultivated, gently nurtured and fiercely protected. In the end, Kindlings reclaims kindness as strength, restraint as power, nature as lodestar, and attentiveness to small things as joy.

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Reviews

Such grace and depths of feeling live in Rachel Linnea Brown's Kindlings. Such complex sorrows and discovered strengths. These poems, rich in music and executed with careful precision, create the illusion of a restless mind that finds in the natural world an echo of the self, and of the self's concerns: love, parting, and the irretrievable past. Here is a place of ""heart-round / lilies / bobbing / upon ponderous / stems,"" where ""everything / is as it should be / without / us."" This is a fabulous collection of poems. -Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears Rachel Linnea Brown's chapbook Kindlings is an ode to smallness-which across these poems manages to accumulate into a kind of vastness. Each poem offers a brief snapshot of observational thought-sometimes addressing the natural world, sometimes the dailiness of an intimate relationship, sometimes the interrelation of both. In one poem, ""a spider drops / upon / my page. / I am / mercy""; in another, a couple on their anniversary acknowledges that the natural world ""barely / knew we breathed."" The language here is so deft and understated, such that we can feel Brown cleaving carefully to her own hard-won bits of advice: ""save / only / the scrap you intend / to ignite,"" and ""no truth / heavier / than sunlight / in rain."" This is a quiet, subtle, and very beautiful collection of poems. -Wayne Miller, author of The End of Childhood

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