How do we experience the world before memory, before language, before the senses have separated, or before the concepts of “you” and “I” have been distinguished? Laynie Browne investigates both the limits and potential of such an inchoate world in her new book of poetry, Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. In a series of elegant prose poems, Browne guides the reader through the intricate development of human perception, where the haunting vastness of childhood slowly gives way to the defining features of adult cognition. Subtly nuanced verse constructs a world of color before sight and utterance before language--all the while aware that, ironically, language itself makes this ethereal world possible.

Browne's Book of Moments strongly recalls her previous Lost Parkour (Ps)alms (2014), while taking a step toward bringing us closer to what we are. We are creatures of prayers. Prayers define us—Prayers stand at the root of poetry.

Poetry. In DAILY SONNETS Laynie Browne charts new territory as she subtly investigates the daily influxes of the poetic moment. From longing for the family in the very midst of the family, to the play of the mind which mimics and shepherds the visible games of children, Browne offers here the mimesis of the possible, a moving reflection of action and intimacy, a letting go and a grasping of the poetic and the political, all in the firm hold of song.

Browne’s psalms are in a close relationship with what an individual experiences or feels. They express precise circumstances. They come as a response to a need, a thirst, a hunger. To find and underline alms in psalms: To write one’s own psalms. Browne’s psalter is grounded in the noble and prestigious tradition of song as a privileged place for personality’s input and growth within and through religion. What a freedom! What a multiplicity of moves is stressed, within such a tradition, one to which Lost Parkour Ps(alms) takes us! With what audacity! With what self-confidence!

Depth Theology taps the religious potential of poetry to access both the interior and the exterior worlds. Inspired by depth psychology, the field of psychology devoted to the unconscious, Peter O'Leary's poems work to discover the religious knowledge of the unconscious mind. While seeking a revelatory poetry, O'Leary engages the inconclusive quality of the revealed, observing that "There's / a liquidy trickiness to life, an entropy / of spillage." The religious imagination that evolves in this series of thirty-four poems is unclouded by dogma and richly colored by erudition, while it tests the limits of human language and experience in an effort to understand our inwardness. Overflowing with images of birds and other objects of day-to-day experience, interwoven with the mythic, allegorical, and biblical, Depth Theology charts a path to understanding our innermost worlds. From "Lux Contemplatio": "there is no place anymore for us to migrate. The need / yet remains. / Antarctica means now an interior domain. Curiosity / about our inner life increases. A nomad's desert God is an inward / generator. Our outward movement yields our soul's circumincession / its insitting / in rotation with the divine abeyance"

Lord Brain is an extended meditation on the psyche (in its double sense of mind and soul) in its relationship to that three-pound bundle in our skull. Bruce Beasley’s collection of thirty-one poems is named for Sir Walter Russell Brain, or Lord Brain (1895-1966), the eminent British neuroscientist and author of Brain’s Diseases of the Nervous System. Bringing into conversation the disparate fields of neuroscience, theology, linguistics, particle physics, and theology, these poems investigate in both lyrical and scientific terms the relationship of brain to mind and soul, and of brain to the cosmos and God. Whether discussing cosmology or astrophysics, neurobiology or insect physiology, Lord Brain connects the inner cosmos of our human anatomy with the external forces (material and divine) that brought the cosmos into being.

What follows occurs in a moment; a flash. It would detail a single tangibility if that did not entail all sensation. Stacy Doris charts the invisible, investigates the unborn, and describes everything not yet imagined. The tightly constructed verses of Knot weave imagery of decay and birth, science and culture: the warp and weft of cloth, digestion, wave particles, and a talking cat. Linguistic play abounds, and Doris presents us with a human double bind: to cling to the stability of the tangle or to participate in the circuits of entanglement. From "Under Fire, i.VII": "Each moment, fifteen pounds of air pin us by gravity. Then / anyone / Needs sixteen pounds of lightness to ever budge. Such compliance / Demands levitation, must generate excitement, which passion enact; / Thus dreams have all they can handle. From a stone, anchored, / is how / We rise, where faith is placed only in potential, miracle without / Dimension's measure so opening, unhinged at least, where each "they" / Is porous, in penetrability dunked and enriched.