Eyewear is very glad to welcome Brooklyn Copeland (pictured) this Friday. I first came to notice her work when I agreed to publish some at Nthposition online magazine. Then I asked to see more of her work. I was very impressed by her stylish, witty, verve-driven poetry, which takes no prisoners, and, to my mind, expresses the best kind of fusion of alternative, and formal, poetic energies.She is also blessed with a memorable, poetic name - never a bad thing for a poet (one thinks of Wordsworth, of Motion). I believe she is an extremely promising younger poet, and that we will read more of her in future.
Copeland was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on March 16th, 1984. As she wrote to me, "a Pisces born to two other Pisces; I reckon I'm destined to either write poetry or become a clairvoyant bag lady."
She lived in the suburbs for most of her childhood, with years spent in Turku, Finland, and Canterbury, England. She has lived in Tampa, Florida for the past few years, with plans to return to England at the beginning of 2008.
Her blog, Alsace-Lorraine, includes links to her most recent publications.
Kate
She was cat-eyed
and turtlenecked, flicking
her kretek over a pop
can, shale bangles
jangling like so many
airport tambourines.
She was fur-tongued
and blurry-worded,
wobbly on her ankles,
top-heavy and moue-
mouthed, powder-nosed
and sloppy, bursting
from her barstool
like a weasel
from a mulberry bush.
Her teeth were rows
of ice in a tray; her poems
Rorschach blots
on a page. And the
stick-fig-faux-scoliosis pose?
Stage-wise, she had one
of those and she worked it
like any blank-faced waif
in shredded runway clothes.
In crowds she laughed alone.
Her soul was lost
but her cry had heart, and when
she asked we fell apart
and spotted her the dough.
Which she probably blew
on blow. And that's
the last we knew of Kate.
poem by Brooklyn Copeland.
It appeared, in a different version, in Burnside Review 3.2.
Comments