Backup Singers, by Sommer Browning
Usually when Birds, LLC puts out a book I have a hard time reading it. I've already spent so much time with it, read various versions, offered my thoughts on them, dealt with designers and printers, the library of congress and more.
When I get the finished book in hand from the printer, all the work leading up to that point is still with me. It's difficult to break away from it and enjoy the book as a book, to move on from the pregnancy and enjoy the baby, so to speak.
When we put out Sommer Browning's Backup Singers I decided I wanted to overcome all that, so I read the book within month of getting it in hand. I'm so glad I did.
First of all, the structure. Challenging. The book begins with a longish sequence of mostly prose poem, “Rue Daguerre.” Beautiful. Clear, but slant. Dare I say, serious. Loaded with poems that perform a dazzling high wire act that teeters between sound and sense, that surprise and disarm—"suffix affixed like a tick like real money to the child cheating at Monopoly."
Section II, "Friend," is, in many ways, a more specific but also widened reinterpretation of Joe Brainard's I Remember that never uses those words, but makes brilliant use of repetition all it's own. "There were the beers / at Sophie's, the whiskeys / at Pete's, the beers at Millie's" and so on goes one poem. "Isn't it wasn't it isn't it so..." and "Chrissy. Chrissy. Chrissy. Chrissy." repeat others.
These are poems about the foolishness, romanticism and absurdity of youth, and the danger—driving "30 miles at night through pitch black counties without headlights using only my cellphone light to guide me"—but also more than that. There's a seriousness and sadness to these poems, a sense that very real, very "grown up" things are starting to happen and they aren't all pleasant. "Melissa is dead," repeats one poem toward the end of the section, and in another a different friend, or maybe the same, may or may not be dying.
Then there's another mainly prose section, “Multifarious Array,” followed by a short section of lineated poems, “Deep Cuts.” And one of those poems, “Safe Bets,” is on the back cover.
This book makes me step back—back up (haha)—and say, "whoa." It makes me feel my own writing is worthless and dumb (but that's probably my own issue). It makes me feel like I need to try harder, in my life and my writing, but also, hey, it's cool. Do what you can. Be yourself. But ultimately for me, and I hope for others, this book helps people live more, have more fun, be more crude, dumber and smarter, but also more genuine and sincere, weird and idiosyncratic, write better, be better, tougher—more loving and caring.
