Requiem for Used Ignition Cap (The Orison Poetry Prize)

Winner of the 2016 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize. Finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series. Finalist for the 2015 Writers' League of Texas Book Award. Named One of the Best Poetry Books of Winter 2016 by Foreword Reviews. . . .

Set in the drought-plagued landscape of Central Texas, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap is a collection of lyric poems that chronicle life in and around Llano, Texas (population 3,033). Catfish heads hang on clotheslines waiting for the ensuing apocalypse. Blue heelers call out from drainage ditches, searching for friendly hands to lick. Hell-fire preachers lament the drowning of a young Pentecostal boy caught in the river's floodgate. Brownlee's poems meditate on the inescapability ofplace. When they give an inch, they do so to take a yard--all the while earnestly making a case for the rural condition's place in contemporary American poetry.

Praise for the collection:

Devotion, whether in poetry or prayer, requires one to pay attention.From the very first poem of this collection to the last, J. Scott Brownlee does exactly that. Whether it is the landscapes of Texas,soldiers home from Iraq, or the awkward ways in which we relate to each other, these poems pay close attention to details and transform them into something organic, whole, and incredibly moving.
-C. DALE YOUNG, judge of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize

J. Scott Brownlee's Requiem for Used Ignition Cap pulses with imagery that grounds and levitates mind and body,crisscrossing some risky borderlands, but always in a zone of quotidian integrity. This collection, honed and shaped, is woven from ordinary lives and dreams, and each trope honors the earth we walk upon. There's a feeling in this collection--voices and rituals that spark the landscape. Brownlee juxtaposes mind and spirit, and there's nowhere these poems don't dare to go.
-YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

The violence of men, the delicacy of their broken bodies, the religiosity of the town that raised them: all of these influence Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, which documents an America we rarely see. In J.Scott Brownlee's Llano, high school football heroes become PTS-affected war vets. The rural dead sing from the hollow flutes their bones leave in the dust. These are poems whose language begins with the body and the land. For Brownlee, the two are inseparable.
-DORIANNE LAUX

In his debut collection, J. Scott Brownlee writes a stunning ode to his rural Texas hometown and its fathers, brothers, and ghosts. Llano is a place where meth addicts score, wildflowers burn, hunters drink in their blinds, slain deer talk, soldiers return from duty with loaded guns,and the Wal-Mart sign glows brighter than Friday night's lights. Informs that barely contain their explosive contents, Brownlee's poems relate and interrogate what's expected of young White men growing up in the rural South. In doing so, they resist the erasure and nostalgia of some Southern literature and instead lay bare the benefits and violent trappings of small-town Christianity and masculinity. These poems are at once song, accusation, self-implication, and prayer--full of the music of a place from which Brownlee is forever removed but from which he will always hail.
-SUSAN B.A. SOMERS-WILLETT