The Desires of Letters

Author: Laynie Browne

Publisher: Counterpath Press (2010) 

Prose, verse, letters, and plays, The Desires of Letters is a searing commentary on writing, mothering, and the navigation of politics, community, and imagination. An homage to Bernadette Mayer's The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, the book begins at the onset of the 2003 Iraq war and becomes "transformative . . . [in] its negotiation of the global and the domestic, beauty made bittersweet with annoyance and exhaustion, all that advice about how to raise a child and write at the same time."

–Juliana Spahr

"Motherhood and housewifery and other worldly concerns of the female artist–provider ride rampant here in this bustling exploding book of prose & poem meditations. One of our best writers does it again."

–Anne Waldman