FOOTNOTES OF MERCY by Stephanie Brown

“Write about what is lost, what is found,” instructs Stephanie Brown in this wonderful collection of poems.  What I admire so much is the way these poems confront time—its passing, what it hands us, what it takes away—with such candor and technical skill.  These poems do, indeed, chart “delight and private pain” as they explore their central themes: love, death, compassion, abandonment, beauty, and the dilemmas of throwing one’s lot in with language. There is redemption here, but it is honestly won.  Read this collection and cherish what happens when we release those “braided reins of past and present” and rediscover, in the moment and in the poem, the magic, truth, and complexity of what it means to be mortal.

–Jude Nutter, author of I wish I Had a Heart like Yours, Walt Whitman and The Curator of Silence

In a touching elegy for college students killed in a winter auto crash, Stephanie Brown laments that in that tragedy there are “No footnotes of mercy.”  But this compassionate, inwardly centered collection is altogether a product of a disciplined practice of empathy, kindness, and, yes, mercy, though not unmixed with justifiable anger for the victims of injustice.  Brown¹s poems are, to quote her gorgeous “Rhapsody,” “a lavish token / placed gently” in the reader¹s palm.  Like the marvelous turtle in “Moons Across the Road,” the poet would “exhale / a footpath of stars / guiding [us] safely / to the other side.

–Thomas R. Smith, author of The Foot of the Rainbow and Glory

Stephanie Brown’s  Footnotes of Mercy compels attention.  This chapbook holds an abundance of reflections, startling, just-right images, and narratives that surprise and grant us points of view we might never have considered before.  Her poems take us to the river, the art museum, food shelves, past tragedies, grief considered and respected, and to unerring portraits of others, and the narrator, too, focused, imperfect, thoughtful, and wise.  Brown praises the world, judges it, creates remarkable alliances with people and with the natural world, and has created a book that once you’ve read it, you want to read it again.  I hope this book finds many readers for this fine poet.

–Deborah Keenan, author of ten collections of poetry, and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer, from broadcraft press.