“Musical, insightful, and all the way human.”―Claudia Rankine, 2016 Barnard Women Poets Prize citation
Each poem in Brittany Perham’s prize-winning collection links two portraits: lover and beloved, child and parent, citizen and country, spirit and body, living and dead. Each speaker investigates what it means to be in relationship to another: what does it mean to see and be seen, to reflect and be reflected, to address and be addressed? With musicality, grit, and humor, these poems challenge our conceptions of identity and language. By questioning the ways we think and speak, the ways we rehash and reshape our experience, they formalize obsession. Emotionally stirring and unapologetic, Double Portrait contemplates the nature of devotion.

Double Portrait (Barnard Women Poets Prize)

Literature & Fiction

Perham, Brittany

Poetry

W.W.Norton&Company

Poetry. Brittany Perham's first collection, THE CURIOSITIES, fixes its sure and unsettling gaze on daughters and fathers, sisters and brothers, madness, sickness, longing and love. These poems make up a cabinet of curiosities because they hold what is fascinating or frightening, beautiful or awesome—a "stomach plumed by syringe," a "zoo's lost leopard," a "forest of high-waisted trees"—up to the eye. In their image-making, the poems place language itself beneath the glass slide of a microscope in order to discern its component structures, its natural patterns. Curiosity here is a way of looking—unsatisfiable, looping back on itself, yielding only further questions. In these uncanny and passionate poems our own lives are made strange to us, and we are wonderstruck. "With curatorial precision and a starling's penchant for multiple threads in both song and shelter, Brittany Perham has fashioned a haven of curiosities captivating to the ear as well as the eye. These poems dream in color and sound: bright, chantant, lifting and lowering the music and the light, so that we are transported from this world into the antechambers of the heart and back again. You cannot re-enter the waking world after reading these lucid, eloquent poems and not feel forever changed."—D. A. Powell

The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions)

Parlor Press

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Books by Perham, Brittany

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Perham, Brittany. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Double Portrait (Barnard Women Poets Prize)

The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions)