Songs in E——, winner of the Barclay Prize for Poetry, forthcoming from Trnsfr Books (2022)
“This is a book wonderfully out of time. With its 19th century sensibility, it takes on the world of today, compressing eras into devastating and yet deeply pleasing clarity. Dan Brady speaks through poets of the past, through reverse translations, through persona, and through ego because his subjects—love and death and faith—require all of it. Through this generous, multilayered seeing, Brady refreshingly stabs at the biggest of concepts to expose their hidden, tender revelations.” – Jennifer Kronovet, author of The Wug Test
To create Songs in E—— , Dan Brady ran Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and Robert Browning’s “One Word More” through an unreliable internet translator into Portuguese and then back into English. The resulting raw material was reshaped into the two poem sequences that make up this strange and startling collection.