A book-length sequence of linked poems, The Adjacent Possible centers on problems of consciousness, inter-subjective relation, theories of emergence, and Buddhist philosophy. These thematic concerns emerge through the dialogic exchange between two abstract figures, as they range across a variety of landscapes and poetic forms, including free verse, hybrid forms, and the traditional Japanese forms of haibun, tanka, and renga. The questions The Adjacent Possible explores are these: How does consciousness emerge into being, and how does one subject, human or otherwise, connect with another? How might poetry—as aural, visual, and elemental matter—catalyze these forms of relation?
About the Author
Julie Phillips Brown is a poet, critic, painter, & book artist. She is the author of The Adjacent Possible (Green Writers Press) and the Founding Editor of House Mountain Review. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Borderlands, Columbia Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, interim, Jacket2, Nashville Review, Plume, Posit, Tahoma Literary Review, Talisman, Vinyl, Yemassee, & elsewhere. A native of Philadelphia, she lives in Lexington, Virginia, where she teaches creative writing, studio art, & American literature. Find her @jphillipsbrown & tactualpoiesis.com.
Praise For…
'This beautifully sinuous collection ignites language and the field around it, enacting the deepest questions of materiality: the hinge between self and nature, vision and substance...It is minimalism as amplitude, a poetics attentive to the smallest function words -- prepositions, conjunctions, articles. Reading such exquisitely made, bioluminescent work is mind altering. I was mesmerized. Dazzled." —Alice Fulton, author of Barely Composed
"Gorgeously spare, hypnotic, the poems in The Adjacent Possible are a meditation on an 'adjacent' possibility '[w]ithout I, without / you,' the insight that 'the joint of two not solids . . . is no joint at all'... The poems in this collection beckon to the relationship of all beings, examine the 'flurried noises' of language, the 'substrata' of consciousness that distinguishes seer and seen, the eye the 'gracejoint.'" —Kathleen Hellen
