No Other Paradise

“‘I am going to keep death from entering this poem,’ Kurt Brown writes in No Other Paradise. These masterful poems are taut with the power of the unspoken. Their urgency is visceral. If the problem of our century is Hegel’s dilemma of cognition and the will—the more we know, the less we can act—Brown is searching for a knowledge so immediate, so free of rhetoric, that our scary responsibilities will open the world up rather than paralyzing us. With a clear eye, zapping wit, and a mind haunted by the unfathomable future, Brown is creating fascinating poetry whose horizons lie far beyond the self. No Other Paradise leaves us in that strangest, richest moment, the human present.”

—D. Nurkse

“At the climax of Kurt Brown’s evocative meditations on everything from nature and news to baloney, there is his astonishing title poem. A walk through a teeming cityscape inhabited by the memorable likes of Miss Donna, “Mystical Astrologist,” this Whitmanesque celebration of the turbulent here-and-now powerfully conveys Brown’s vision of the fleeting, sensory moment, a view summed up in his echoing line: don’t let go.”

—Kimiko Hahn