I’m Your Huckleberry

Poetry. Women’s Studies. Poems of desire, romantic poems, poems written for a beloved other–they are often overlooked in contemporary literature, arriving from a genre once heralded as a necessary thematic excursion for any poet worthy of the title, though having since been, through ubiquity, relegated to a lower tier, as if appetites and passions were finally outed as passe, the banal concerns of a different era. Yet here is Erika Jo Brown’s incredible debut, inhabiting the same unsafe places explored by Neruda, Yeats, Rossetti, Keats, Whitman–not light verse, but whimsical and mysterious, quixotic, fearful and ecstatic. This is what love breeds, what it encapsulates but cannot seem to hold: an uncertainty that makes living worth it.