Andrea Brady

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Biographical note:  Andrea Brady was born in Philadelphia in 1974. She studied at Columbia University and wrote a doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge on Renaissance funerary elegy. She now teaches English literature at Brunel University. With Keston Sutherland she runs Barque Press, whose titles include 100 Days, an anthology of dissent against the Bush administration. Laws in Mourning: English Funerary Elegy in the 17th Century is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2005.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857165
ISBN-10:  1876857161
ISBN-13:  9781876857165
Author:  Andrea Brady
Title:  Vacation of a Lifetime
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-01
Extent:  144pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  216 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 7.95
Price:  USD 12.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  

Table of contents:
Liberties, the White Wish Part 1
1. For charity, she crawls through a soft rut
2. White bubbled and spread in the hazard field
3. Frost cells freeze hillocks where they
4. Peace where her wound is, flapping like a fried egg
5. White Wish
6. The Former Character
7. Their xenophobe
8. Foxgloves snipped from highway scruff
9. How We Sighted Yellow Danger
10. Save which he would destroy the land, send back
11. An Ell Down
12. Raped by constant indeterminacy, by which the empty sac
13. Here, flattened and gored by the white rushing
Liberties, the City Adorned like a Bride Part 2
1.Driven to my office; he kicked out the split line
2. Fine with candour, they plead
3. The interior reflected a calm decision as pine covers
4. From their tangled midst one shudder rises
5. Short of sanitary hopes what drives us into that
6. Waiting, waiting for sleep’s daring end with you
7. So catch up with them in the emptied cities help
8. Hopes for managed care stagger up
9. A slow hope, a casual feed, this is how
10. Distance is a trance of clarity, a wish to elongate the will
11. By the time of that voice-incision we’re nearly
12. Disappointment is a ruptured omen, a fragment
13. Darling of the hour meets on television
14. Packet of the last seconds wins again. Heaven
15. Empty as a factory, the actress begs another
16. Look to your foe for relief. If he is not my enemy
17. Recognition costs the dream of completion, spinning
18. I’ve been Between taking witnesses for
19. Some live to evade, to creep over the ground
20. Spurning disaster by consistency at my
21. Write whore there on that white cheek where health
22. With this I snap a brittle workday over my knee
23. Mo news but gladness uncurls a blank fist on its shoulder
24. Contentment came to form in my mouth, majesty recurred
25. Beneficence, that lenient god in corners. Collect
26. The thrill seeps out generally, peppering the soil
27. A few feathers cling to the corner of the door. We have shut
The Torpedo of Excess
Pornopolis
Spoken For
Perpendicular Twins
Dreamcast
Ode to the Listserve
Ali 1 & 2
Later That Day
Pulse, Station, Band
Feeding Lola’s Brother
Function of the Commonwealth and Overseas Trust
Girl Talk
The Vacant Embassy
Hard on Soft Fatal
Little Miss Wanna
Quilted for Comfort
They Come to Us in Dream
(O Jezza)
am I some kind of legionnaire?
Plead with Me
Park American Dream
Plan for a Double
Threnody
Chalk
Tri-state Forecast
Song (for Florida)
Common Decency
The Pledge of Allegiance
Inaugural Weekend
Playing the Honeypot
Migration
Fold and Release
Notice to Existing Customers
Seasonals 9b-0z
All Souls seasonal 9b
Rememberance seasonal 9d
5 November 9f
Post Festen e
Scaffold Pike 9j
Play Patience, Christmas seasonal 9z-1
New Year 0a
Sleeper: Valentine 0c
Spring Seasonal 0h
Ash Wednesday Seasonal 0i
Britain reciprocate Zimbabwe
May Day/0k
Solstice in the Highlands, 0m
July 4 is on seasonal
Faculty Meeting: Item 5.0p, Bedwetting
Anticipating One August 0q
6 August: Hiroshima Day; Tenth Anniversary Santions. 7 August: Birthdate of Mata Hari
The Birthday Party 0s
The End of: Seasonal 0z

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Excerpt from book:  

Migration

bright talons of pollen migrate
up the map of the United Kingdom into
snowbright circles of the pole
so our talk had a certain ring to it.

clattering before the camera caribou
race their leafy heads through crannies on the
canada map. they can feel bishops’
eyes staring down the tube and still run

cool like vast colonies of whales for the frost.
ventricles of the ocean squeeze blue wineskins
burst onto the ice cake and the sky reflects
mazes of blood from the white plains. i take you

into my heart. i take you
into my foot throttling its shake of ground
into my belly like tomorrow into my hips
for the acres to be covered by sundown. you have

no choice as flocks of screeching
amazonian birds arrive to replace us
the herd runs in one body under the high
tree of sky. we leave our smell on the backs of chairs.

Review quote:  Effecting an off-site sifting of virulently sexualized, life-style-propping policies that kill people, Andrea Brady takes readers on a Vacation of a Lifetime, her first book of poems. An American poet now teaching in London, Brady works past First World lies and representations, taking idioms and ideology and warping them back from outside: “bullets/ bought by staff at the heart shaped cafe.” Throughout, the book’s deep engagement with lyric as valid and viable cultural expression, despite its imperial history in English, evinces a belief in imagining other truths: “If you can reach/ to pull your presents toward you, I am there/ at the breaking point, floodlit with you and different/ as the world is now: I found/ for you a brighter hemisphere.

Publishers Weekly

Review quote:  Freedom to move through different gears allows the recycling of different registers to overlap without straining the juxtaposition of local word games and harsh political realities. The fire power generated by torpedoes of excess is just what these poems need and theres plenty of transgression. If some of the poems relate to news stories whose urgency has faded in the light of subsequent events, theres still something new about the sense of a political testament, a record of what it means to face up to the problems of the present. This book is not for the faint-hearted, and it takes a while to find ways into the brasher surfaces, but it is a rare example of a book of poems where the struggle between political radicalism and poetic form is worth sharing. Despite its title, Vacation of a Lifetime is no holiday.

Keith Elliot
Terrible Work