Memento Mori: a book of sonnets by M. Brooke Wiese

Memento Mori: a book of sonnets by M. Brooke Wiese

$17.99

 

Brooke Wiese is an exquisite formal poet. Here, she breathes new life into the sonnet and rides at ease in patterns of her own invention. Many of her lines, and even some of her rhymes, are ruthlessly witty and almost successfully hide her heart, which beats within as faithfully as her rhythms.

–Billy Collins

 

In her smart, witty, lucid sonnets M. Brooke Wiese reinvigorates scenes and delivers up memories. Her piquant poems dive deep into love, family relationships, growing up, ageing and New York City. Whether her subject is an escaped owl, a boy’s first-growth beard, or a disappointed love, Wiese is piercingly observant, always offering an original point of view, bolstered by that most supple of poetic forms, the sonnet. Wiese has spent a lifetime with poetry, and the intensity of years lived reading and pondering shows in the intensely crafted poems of this splendid debut.

–Molly Peacock, author of The Widow’s Crayon Box

 

In her chapbook of sonnets Memento Mori, M. Brooke Wiese finds death everywhere: in a Cezanne still life, a schoolyard, lurking behind the scenes of childhood memories. Some poems convey pain, others great joy, as if the awareness of the space between the contradictory realities behind life and death compels us to understand the mysteries of all that we fear and love. Parents after death are “still stealing our love like a thief,” while “Age does not glide in like a swan,/ but like a flatbottomed scow,” and in early spring, before the abundance of blooming flowers, a dramatic couplet, “Demeter now keeps her daughter housebound,/ implores her to stay nine months above ground.” Traditional forms support the explorations, many of them set in the City of New York.

–Joyce Wilson, The Poetry Porch

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Description

Memento Mori: a book of sonnets

by M. Brooke Wiese

Paper

$15.99 List: $17.99

979-8-89990-000-6

2025

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This title will be released on May 23 , 2025

Many years have transpired between the publication of M. Brooke Wiese’s first chapbook and this, her second, Memento Mori, published by FLP.  Wiese’s first, titled At the Edge of the World and written in her “salad days,” was full of youthful wonder and romantic yearnings.  In this book, Wiese considers with the practiced eye of a lifelong observer all the things that make up a life:  the flush of youth in her teenaged sons, failed relationships, renewed love, the societal tragedies of our own creation, the death of parents “papery and brittle as a late-Autumn leaf riddled with pinholes,” and her ageing self – “I am losing at least one word a day…” – a poet’s worst nightmare.  In one poem the poet holds her fingers to the night sky on either side of the bright, full moon as if she is cradling it between her spread fingers, or holding her whole world in her hand.  From inside the shadows of mortality, Wiese looks forward and back and then forward again, meditating on the renewal of life in a spring leaf unfurling “in palest green,” the magnificence of a red-tailed hawk gallivanting around the city, delight in a pod of dolphins spotted on a beach walk, and the lights across the bay that “glitter along the mainland shore like far-away planets and stars.”  There’s always something new to see.

M. Brooke Wiese’s work has appeared most recently in The Road Not Taken, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Sparks of Calliope, and in Poem. Her chapbook, At the Edge of The World, was published by The Ledge Press in 1999, and her sonnets have been taught by poet Billy Collins to his college students, as well as anthologized and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. After a very long hiatus she has been writing furiously again. She writes in traditional forms on contemporary subjects in a modern voice. She lives with her wife and sons in New York City, has worked in education and nonprofit social services, and currently teaches English at a special education inclusive school in Manhattan, to high school students of all abilities.

 

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