Matthew Leavitt Brown

Thou Art That Matthew Leavitt Brown

In Thou Art That Matthew Leavitt Brown offers lyrical insights into the complicated ways memory shapes us before, during, and after terminal illness. Through a braided network of individual and disembodied voices, Brown exemplifies a sense of how time, loss, and grief comingle to form a new presence that comes to both fill and haunt the void left by the death of a loved one. Written during the long-term illness and passing of several of his immediate family members, as well as during a prolonged illness of his own, these poems capture something important about the spiritual alienation and search for purpose that necessarily accompany our collective condition of human frailty.