The Disheveled Bed

Foreword by Brooks Haxton

A collection of poetry about dislocation in an unexpectedly childless marriage. A time of wandering follows a period of exile and adjustment both within and without. The poems are both lyrical and colloquial with a fascination for invented forms that mirrors the altered circumstances of life.

Andrea Carter Brown is the author of The Disheveled Bed (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and two chapbooks, Domestic Karma (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Brook & Rainbow (winner of the Sow’s Ear Press Chapbook Prize, 2001). September 12, her collection of award-winning poems about 9/11 and its aftermath, is forthcoming in 2021 for the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Her poems have won awards from Five Points, River Styx, and PSA, among others, and are cited in the Library of Congress Online Guide to the Poetry of 9/11. She was a Founding Editor of Barrow Street and Managing Editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal. Currently she is Series Editor of The Word Works Washington Prize. An avid birder, she lives in Los Angeles where she grows lemons, limes, oranges, and tangerines in her back yard.

(Change of Life on) Synarel®

Seven days into it I don’t know
myself. Temples tight, lips cracked,
I snap at friends, stiff one cabbie

because he drives too slow, another
for his offer to father himself my child.
Hot flashes, cold waves. Knuckles,

knees give way. Breath, armpits,
feet reek. Teeth ache, nose bleeds
but gums do not, as they should

this time of the month, bloated with
blood that will not come despite cramps
that start and stop. The doctor

promises this will reverse itself
although the drug is so new how can
anyone know? Hair goes limp, falls

out. Making love hurts. I avoid
people, insult my husband. One sniff
in each nostril morning and night,

then waking at 3 a.m. in my sweat-
drenched half of our double bed.
And the terrible thirst.

Brown records the disappointment and courage of a woman unable to bear the children she and her husband want. Without hedges or illusions, the poems present the crucial details of clinical visits, miscarriage, mourning, and the difficulty of sustaining and reconstructing oneself, one’s marriage, and the world. The Disheveled Bed, reverberates with the complexities of a whole life, tested by its particular turnings. The poems celebrate the strength of mind and the art that find truths in experience unblurred by evasion . . . In the background . . . textures of city living the country and the seaside are interwoven with family relationships and the difficult chosen love of married life. When in the title poem the poet hears the songs of the birds under her window, we feel with her: “the random yet orderly / rise and fall of their songs rising as high / as our high-rise home.” It’s an equally miraculous privilege, as a reader of these vital poems, to find myself in earshot.
— Brooks Haxton

Andrea Carter Brown’s remarkable debut book, The Disheveled Bed, may be disheveled in circumstance, but never in craft or intensity. The poems here amount to the chapters in a love story. Filled with passionate craft, a collected wisdom, and the heartbreaking story of a woman and a man in search of a child who find themselves instead, The Disheveled Bed is the first book of poems every poet dreams of: naturally intelligent, unself-conscious, yet knowing, and with a full chiaroscuro of hope and pain. It is like a banquet set among shadows. Here, sit, read and feast.
— Molly Peacock

The precision and wit of Brown’s language transform events that are almost aggressively mundane into exemplars of human enterprise. Her book joins those which subject the increasing medicalization of contemporary life to poetry’s scrutiny. But above all, she is a nature poet of urban life.
— Marilyn Hacker

March 2006
124 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9
$16
978-0-9723045-3-5