The Women Who Loved
E lvis All Their Lives
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Breathing In, Breathing Out 
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The Devil's Child 
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Do Not Peel the Birches 
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Fishing with Blood 
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On The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives:
What
a remarkable collection! Fleda Brown has turned obsession into a series
of finely wrought evocations of a period. She knows her music, and she knows
that her early stirrings in relation to it were emblematic of a nation’s.
There’s consistently high quality of phrasing in this book, and an
astute framing of effects. Which is to say Fleda Brown has been able to
raise popular culture into art like few others before her.--Stephen Dunn
“You think the fat women who cried didn’t know/what they
cried for, when he died?” asks Fleda Brown in this spirit-lamp of
a book that filters our “irreconcilable urges” through an
iconography that renews, once again, America’s promise. As much
about the mysteries of the creative process, its “private language,”
and the rigors of self-discipline as about Elvis himself, The Women Who
Loved Elvis All Their Lives accomplishes something original, perfect in
its moment, that triggers, as if by accident, an “astonished whoop.”
If Elvis lives anywhere these days, he surely lives in these seductive
pages.
--Michael Waters
This is one of the best accounts
I’ve ever read of what obsession with our idols can reveal to us
about ourselves. The consciousness at the center of these subtle, intricate
poems glides so smoothly from one point of view to another—from
Elvis and his mother visiting his father in prison, to a fan and her teenage
daughter, to a dead Elvis trying to “break through to flesh”
by lifting weights—that the border between one person and another
blurs. Brown’s poems show compellingly how the Other becomes a mirror
in which we can reconsider our own lives and then return to them transformed.
--Sharon Bryan
On Breathing In, Breathing Out:
Fleda Brown has such a wide ranging intelligence, such a large and quirky variety of subjects, and such facility with language that you come away from her poems amazed at the emotional impact under the entertaining and colloquial surfaces. This is a fine and original book. --Linda Pastan
Brown deftly explores the otherness that language both gives and inflicts on us. "One day Adam said 'Adam,'/ and found out he was standing/ across the field from everything/ else," she tells us. Nothing is changed and everything is, once words separate us from nature. Fleda Brown's great skill with that alienating and communicating tool, language, is to show us how dazzlingly strange the familiar world is. --Andrew Hudgins
Fleda Brown brings brilliance and craft to the inexplicable narratives of lived memory. In poem after poem her omnivorous intelligence, driven to understand, stands poised beautifully on the moment between breaths. --Marilyn Nelson
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On The Devil’s Child:
This dark, ambitious narrative full of voices, echoes and whispers of anguish is deftly plotted and carefully crafted. Here is a challenging poetry of action and remembrance and the sheer, downright, daily human grotesque. But it is also a poetic sequence that does something altogether more difficult: it holds our interest and its own lyric balance at one and the same time. It compels the sort of music from pain which is hard to forget. --Eavan Boland
….this book represents an impressive effort. It shows how poetry can enter intrepidly into areas more often reserved to the novel: the most sordid aspects of human behavior. --Poetry
. . . .I trust I’ve made it clear how highly I regard these poems. To take a character whom most would think either deranged or so deeply damaged as to be irreparable—in any case, so extreme as to deserve only that sensationalistic attention found in TV “magazines”—and instead to see her involvement with the broader range of humanity seems to me a splendid achievement. ---W. D. Snodgrass [from the Foreword]
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On Do Not Peel the Birches:
The poems in Fleda Brown Jackson’s second book . . . exhibit the kind of present-tense clarity one associates with Elizabeth Bishop . . . . To read these poems is to look through a newly washed window; the world is strangely bright and, at the same time, frighteningly familiar. This is a difficult effect to achieve—one that only succeeds when it is not an effect, but something effortless. In Jackson’s hands, effort is invisible. --The Georgia Review
When domestic poetry reveals the profound and esoteric, it does so in a circuitous way, but when it does it is moving and, sometimes, terrifying. Fleda Brown Jackson is face to face, in these poems, with the wildness, whether she is swimming with an old aunt or waltzing at the Pappy Burnett Pavilion or remembering her father taking her retarded brother sailing. A culture is revealed here; and a brave vision. ---Gerald Stern
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On Fishing with Blood:
“A splendid collection of poems with the special merit of being both intensely artful and equally interesting. No one to my knowledge has written better about Georgia O’Keeffe, and many have tried. Fleda Brown Jackson has a good wit, a sharp eye, and a tough character.” --Dave Smith
“Fleda Brown Jackson gives us a rich and revealing series of family portraits, memorable for the vividness of its narrative texture.” ---David Wagoner
“Fishing With Blood is a magical kind of seeing, an uncluttered wonder, and when we finish it, we are left with an unsettling brilliance of presences. ---Harry Humes
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