In Garments Worn by Lindens by Laynie Browne (Tender Buttons Press, paperback)
Publication Date: April 1, 2019
Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Women's Studies. Here IN GARMENTS WORN BY LINDENS, Laynie Browne begins a project she terms "homage text" for the poet Rosmarie Waldrop. All titles (which appear in italics above each brief prose poem) are taken from Waldrop's book, Lawn of Excluded Middle, originally published by Tender Buttons Press in 1993. As Browne's sequence progresses, echoes of Waldrop's text occur throughout the work with slight alternations. This new book continues to investigate gender, perception, personhood as well as permissions to invoke and explore all "excluded middles." In this way, Browne rewrites, responds to, and refigures the material of language in a way that echoes the way Waldrop works with Wittgenstein's sentences making them utterly new in only the way a poet can. In Lawn of Excluded Middle, Rosmarie Waldrop writes: "Poetry an alternate less linear logic." Here, Laynie Browne weaves an intricate, intertextual poem of associational praise into a new practice, a new form.