Songs in E--

The vagaries of faith and desire are transliterated into the philosophical and revelatory in this playful Winner of the Barclay Prize for Poetry.

To create SONGS IN E----, Dan Brady ran Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and Robert Browning's "One Word More" through an unreliable internet translator into Portuguese and then back into English. The resulting raw material was reshaped into the two poem sequences that make up this strange and startling collection.

"The poems in Songs in E---- are love missives, meditations on mortality and desire, at once elegiac and playful. Dan Brady writes about love and conscience and forgiveness through the lens of a philosopher and then creates such beauty by turning everything upside down and looking at it again. Section by section, poem by poem, line by line, these poems reimagine and dismantle what it means to love each other in multiple voices. 'Heartbreak makes adults of us' Brady writes, and this book is going to grow us all up."--W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings

"This is a book wonderfully out of time. With its 19th century sensibility, it takes on the world of today, compressing eras into devastating and yet deeply pleasing clarity. Dan Brady speaks through poets of the past, through reverse translations, through persona, and through ego because his subjects--love and death and faith--require all of it. Through this generous, multilayered seeing, Brady refreshingly stabs at the biggest of concepts to expose their hidden, tender revelations."--Jennifer Kronovet, author of The Wug Test