Apprentice to a Breathing Hand

Poetry that considers how we live with constant shifts, positioning alchemy as an example of endless change.   The poetry of Laynie Browne’s Apprentice to a Breathing Hand explores alchemy, connectivity, and perception. Throughout the collection, Browne considers the formation and limits of personhood, the experience of a body moving through time, and the imperative to continually learn and unlearn. Browne looks to alchemy as a practice for cultivating the impossible, positioning it as a fitting model for our current moment. In the material of language, meaning must be unmade and remade endlessly, and in this continual regeneration, Browne considers the alchemy of how a poem can in turn transform the poet. Moving through methods of making and unmaking, the collection centers on the figure of an apprentice working in a space of indeterminacy, lack, breath, and constant shifting.  

About the Author :
Laynie Browne is the author of seventeen collections of poems, three novels, and a book of short fiction. Her recent books of poetry include Intaglio Daughters, Practice Has No Sequel, Letters Inscribed in Snow, and Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists. She coedited I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women and edited A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel. Her work has appeared in publications including Conjunctions, A Public Space, New American Writing, BrooklynRail, and in anthologies including The Ecopoetry Anthology, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Honors include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award. She teaches creative writing and coordinates the MOOC Modern Poetry at the University of Pennsylvania.  

Review :
“In Apprentice to a Breathing Hand, Browne has convoked an opulent meditation on feminist practice and presence. This is a book of the phenomenologies of intention as functions of the senses: the five physical senses, yes, but also the other senses, that drive the self towards the ‘calm words’ that bracket both empathy and ephemerality. As far as instructions for living go, Browne ‘tries to explain’ but prefers to show, after the manner of Julian of Norwich. The terms of ‘wanting yourself back’ are dual: garner on the one hand, oracular on the other.” “Browne writes the path forward in this luminous manuscript where language is alchemy, the mercury in a medium that dissolves and reconstructs the self by growing tendrils under her own banner. Apprentice to a Breathing Hand is a brilliant lyrical achievement.” “‘The women who ask bodies to be present and constant are dancers’—a proposition suggesting that significance and signification are ever-present, awaiting the activation of attention. Lyric address to a beloved ‘you,’ dilated to include the fictive, the plural, and the non-human is one such activation offered by Apprentice to a Breathing Hand. Also: the release of song and chant that harbor in speech alongside the histories that shelter in etymologies. Here we learn to believe in the agency of expansion and preservation, energetic forces by which the word and its selves blossom.”