Book
The Adjacent Possible
The Adjacent Possible
Winner of the 2019 Hopper Poetry Prize
Green Writers Press, 2021
This beautifully sinuous collection ignites language and the field around it, enacting the deepest questions of materiality: the hinge between self and nature, vision and substance. When Julie Phillips Brown ‘uncintures the word,’ it flies into the wild proximity of negative space, sculpting blankness as if it, too, were tangible, transforming the page into a brilliant, reverberant arena. Her poems, like Emily Dickinson’s, ‘dwell in possibility,’ considering the interweaving of one and many, tracing ecosystems, seasons, and ‘lovers’ synchronicities.’ Foreground and background yield a recombinant music; uninscribed areas become an intrinsic part of the composition, iridescent counterweights. The lines that score this residual brightness are elegant and spare as brushstrokes. The background torques around linguistic gestures that seem heliotropic, led by the light that holds them. This is ‘winterfruit,’ a nourishment that emerges from the page’s snow into juice, color, sound, embodiment. It is minimalism as amplitude, a poetics attentive to the smallest function words—prepositions, conjunctions, articles. Reading such exquisitely made, bioluminescent work is mind altering. I was mesmerized. Dazzled.
