Grey Brown is a wonderful poet with a strong talent for rendering the sensations, immanences and strangenesses of childhood. Saturn with its rings in a googly eye; the bear in its caged shadow; all the trucks in America speed toward the father's produce warehouse. These observations once were true—now Grey Brown makes them true again. Simply fine!
–Fred Chappell
Former North Carolina Poet Laureate
Winner of the Bollingen Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize
Staying In is a wonderful collection of poems—heartbreaking, tough, and true. Grey Brown takes on the difficult past, layered like dirty wax on a grade school floor; the limitations of living in a small tobacco town, and especially the complexities of family dynamics. And though she discovers many "small seeds of darkness" there, she also works "to find the cracks in darkness," the thin strips of light and hope and love. In every poem, however edgy or threatening, there is a "sudden flurry underfoot" of invigorating imagery and wit and spirit: poem by poem and as a whole, this is a first-rate chapbook.
–Michael McFee
Winner of the 2006 Thomas Wolfe Literary Award
Staying In is a collection of a strong and powerful poetry. Grey Brown's economy of language makes her poetry compelling and thought-provoking.
–Sam Ragan
Former North Carolina Poet Laureate
I admire the poems very much, their delicate reticence, the clarity of their memory and of their insight.
–Marilyn Nelson
Connecticut Poet Laureate
When They Tell Me
Finishing Line Press, 2009
"Here is the steady gaze of a poet in complete command of her material, however close to the bone. The collection is that rare jewel indeed, a deeply personal story of enormous sadness that becomes art in the hands of a wonderful writer, every line of it trailing light."
Betty Adcock
Click here for more information about When They Tell Me
Cover photo by Cynthia Gurganus
Cover design by Georganne Eubanks