ISBN 9781733408202
A study of the ways we replicate and resist oppressive social structures, Emily Brandt’s Falsehood is a biting, earnest, and sometimes playful reckoning. Stuck in the suburbs of White America, Brandt’s speaker scratches the surface of the dreamy veneer and finds worlds of repression, oppression and hidden abuses. Such violences are steeped in a normalcy these poems resist. With remarkable precision, Brandt's potent debut offers a searing meditation on the forces that would control us.
© Emily Raw
Emily Brandt is the author of three chapbooks, and her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She’s been in residence at Saltonstall Arts Colony and was a 2016 Emerging Poets Fellow at Poets House. She earned an MFA from New York University, where she facilitated the Veterans Writing Workshop. Emily is a co-founding editor of No, Dear, curator of the LINEAGE reading series at Wendy’s Subway, and an Instructional Coach at a NYC public school.
Flowers are expensive for a reason.
All the lines radiate from the center.
We have a lot to learn as a species.
Our ancestors crossed very cold spaces.
If it were us, we would have surely died.
Everyone comes over and walks down
spiral steps. Sometimes someone ends up bleeding.
“Emily Brandt’s Falsehood takes the reader on some enlightening turns in a suburban landscape, where the dilemma of binary constructs frame the journey, with grit in the light of surreal time, but every gesture sings true. At times, bold and risky, the poems defy anything codified or one-dimensional, always requiring the reader’s full engagement. An echo of contact—mind and body—resounds, and the truth in language lives after encounter. Though many-sided, each poem is always now.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Emperor of Water Clocks
“We move through so much of life without a witness, I want Emily Brandt to be mine. Falsehood is a collection of everyday interactions and not normal situations that the world likes to call normal. And just when I thought no one was paying attention, here comes Brandt, she’s been absorbing and collecting the unacceptable norms built by the patriarchy all along. The result is Falsehood, a fierce translation and actualization of so many moments we assumed we were alone with. Brandt’s poetry is like a feminist sleeper cell, easing us out of isolation for a laugh before continuing our lifetime sentence of talk therapy and EMDR. Thank the goddess and the witness!”
—Sini Anderson, Director of The Punk Singer