Swans

Michelle Brown's second book of poetry, Swans, begins as a night out between three best friends at an eponymous watering hole before becoming a phantasmagorical coming-of-age fable by closing time. In between, memory shifts and poems shuffle like songs on a jukebox, detailing fraught female friendship, sexual awakening, alcohol abuse and abandon in the dying days of a decade of decadence. Swans is a whip-smart collection from one of Canada's catchiest lyric poets. Michelle Brown's second book of poetry, Swans, begins as a night out between three best friends at an eponymous watering hole before becoming a phantasmagorical coming-of-age fable by closing time. In between, memory shifts and poems shuffle like songs on a jukebox, detailing fraught female friendship, sexual awakening, alcohol abuse and abandon in the dying days of a decade of decadence. Swans is a whip-smart collection from one of Canada's catchiest lyric poets. Michelle Brown's second book of poetry, Swans, begins as a night out between three best friends at an eponymous watering hole before becoming a phantasmagorical coming-of-age fable by closing time. In between, memory shifts and poems shuffle like songs on a jukebox, detailing fraught female friendship, sexual awakening, alcohol abuse and abandon in the dying days of a decade of decadence. Swans is a whip-smart collection from one of Canada's catchiest lyric poets. SWANS dips us tenderly into a time when impulse leaps into danger-- but somehow survives it. Who are we to survive such a thing? Who could we have been? Like deer leaping over fences, these poems surface fleetingly into a past that defines us, even as our other selves climb or glide through other doorways into the present and into the future.