Either Way Im Celebrating

Either Way I'm Celebrating

Sommer Browning

Whether a traditional lyric, a section-length love poem about cage fighting, or a collage of prose and fragments meditating on a haunted and haunting domestic architecture, the poems in Sommer Browning's Either Way I'm Celebrating share the same DNA base pairs of humor and sentiment, skepticism and humanism; the source of their integrity is how Browning combines and recombines them. Complemented throughout by her sardonic comics, this collection stubbornly celebrates, if only our own absurdity.

What People Are Saying

Mathias Svalina

Sometimes I think Sommer Browning is a James Wright for the basic cable generation, at others the gorgeously deformed lovechild of H.D. and Groucho Marx. What I mean is I cannot categorize these poems, and that's the highest compliment I can give any poetry.

Graham Foust

All objections to progress," writes Hans Blumenberg, “could come down to the fact that it hasn't yet taken us far enough." That's philosophy—and it's funny—but no one would ever level the same complaint at pain or laughter, this fine book's subjects and two phenomena that can take human beings great distances almost immediately. Absolutely modern—but never resolutely maudlin—Sommer Browning doesn't settle for making it new; rather, she lets it bleed and gets us there on time.

Jean Valentine

Well / I don't know / Sommer / Browning's new book / EITHER WAY I'M CELEBRATING / so different from mine / made me laugh /so it's no sin / it made me see this place anew / it moved me in my air-shield / Sommer / your heart was open as this cup.

Inside the Book

Category:
Poetry / Comics
Binding:
Perfect-bound. 96 pp
Dimensions
8.8" x 5.9"
Publication Date:
March 2011
ISBN:
9780982617755

Reviews

Steven Karl

The Faster Times

From the Book

Either Way I'm Celebrating

	  			

They're saying irony is dead.
And for a few minutes I thought

I might die too—a woman
who would buy a fifth of liquor
and a pregnancy test just to see
the look on the clerk's face.

It's always strange to be born
before the cusp of some new age,
hanging onto nothing as if it were

Los Angeles. I remember glaring
through the windshield of the family
Pacer, watching a thirty-foot man
crack jokes on the screen.

My parents were laughing,
but I didn't get the way something
huge and astonishing could be flat,
could not exist at all.

Don't be Afraid to Help Sharks

	  			

So we all had these rayguns.

And it was dark, but you could see

their shellacked brilliance

every now and then, burning

into the night. My sister

was the first to puss out.

I heard her misfire—such

skittering limitlessness—and I knew

she'd given up. I kept on,

they were finally in my sights.As I

raised the raygun, my motion was arrested

by the curious conflagration of an essence unhinged.

Gooey, out there beyond the yew.