Fence Above the Sea
Brigitte Byrd
“Her poems are like the best music: as intimate as a lover’s body, as startling and fulfilling as a dream.”—David Kirby
“The prose poems of Brigitte Byrd are a hymn to the everyday, but a hymn based on the contingencies of language. The six series in Fence Above the Sea are homage to poets and thinkers including Rilke, Cixous, Char, Artaud, and Radiohead, among others. She is a wise, ebullient poet whose prose poems are mosaics of humor and loss, a playful requiem for life as it is in this dangerous new century.”—Maxine Chernoff
“[Byrd’s] simplicity disarms us, as though we always mistook for difficulty our own acquisitiveness, sought more where lack itself was missing. I know of few books that undergo their words as utterly. Fence Above the Sea is a primer of presentness, that unimaginable task, this being here now.”—R.M. Berry
The speaker of Brigitte Byrd’s debut volume pivots in the roles of mourning daughter, affectionate mother, and poet whose attention to the sensory and sensual world never falters. In language both musical and linguistically playful, Byrd revivifies the form of unlineated lyric that in her hands reminds us of its French forebears and could never be termed prosaic. These poems haunt, ache, and celebrate by turns, and always they sing.
