What Flesh Inherits, Volume 14
Poems
Will be published approx. on 1. October 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
84 pages
978-1-68003-473-8 (ISBN)
Description
What Flesh Inherits is a meditation on home, identity, belief, and the ways in which small-town Texas culture has shaped Brownlee's own origin story, as well as the experiences and stories of the friends and family members in the town where he grew up (Llano, TX, population 3,033). Readers are introduced to not only Brownlee's Hill Country roots and memories, but also a quasi-gospel exploring the life, death, and resurrection of Aron Anderson, a fictional character introduced midway through the book who is assembled from the people and landscape that defined the poet's childhood. Brownlee and Anderson's voices join a chorus of unexpected speakers in this collection that include grasshoppers, deer, coyotes, catfish, and other Hill Country creatures and spirits, teaching us what it means to belong even when we feel, at times, like exiles in familiar places.
The Sabine Series in Literature, No. 14
The Sabine Series in Literature, No. 14
Reviews / Votes
"J. Scott Brownlee's What Flesh Inherits is as much about exile and departure as it is arrival, belonging, and homecoming. I'm drawn to the mix of tenderness and tact Brownlee summons as he writes this final love letter to a hometown whose demons split time as angels. Coaches fracture teenage boys' bodies, fathers transform into white-tail bucks, and the dead rise again as catfish in these surreal poems. As Brownlee unleashes the rural gods of air, earth, fire, and water, he reminds us that "joy has a sadness in it we are able to claim if we hear its music."-Dorianne Laux, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems"There's an elegiac tone to this fine collection, which rides on its deep feeling and resonant imagery. The barns dismantle. The deer and men wound each other. A mother collapses in her son's arms after a failed surgery. But the April wildflowers also bloom after spring rain in a Hill Country landscape that reminds me of James Wright's rural Ohio and the California farmlands of Larry Levis. Brownlee's Llano is a place where redemption is always on the menu-where the local Dairy Queen hands out free Blizzards to the deserving and the undeserving alike without charging for them."-Joseph Millar, author of Shine
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Huntsville
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Weight
170 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-68003-473-8 (9781680034738)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
J. Scott Brownlee is a poet from Llano, Texas. His first full-length collection, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, was selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize, named a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and received the 2016 Best First Book of Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.