Zero to Three: Poems

by F. Douglas Brown, Tracy K. Smith (Selected by)

Overview

What started out as a way to address dealing with parenting and, in particular, fatherhood, became a series of poems focused on familial roles and situations that are difficult to articulate, even among family members. The poems in Zero to Three mark both the change in the child and in the father, who is also a son himself. The term “zero to three” derives from the developmental period that many clinicians and pediatricians believe is the most fundamental phase for children whose delicate brains are undergoing drastic and formative change. Research also shows that parents undergo formative change alongside their children during this period from conception to toddler age. These poems do not intend to offer a definitive stance on parenting or fatherhood but, rather, to capture an emotional gestational period that extends beyond the womb and exceeds beyond the grave. They celebrate pop culture and family, as well as lament the anguish and frustration of a parent losing his temper or a parent losing a parent. Ultimately, these poems attempt to sing and dance in the fact that parenting is a wonderful mystery to witness and experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820347271
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	10/15/2014
Series:	Cave Canem Poetry Prize Series
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

F. DOUGLAS BROWN is an English teacher at Loyola High School of Los Angeles.

F. DOUGLAS BROWN is an English teacher at Loyola High School of Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

I Zero 3

Circumstance 4

The Skin of His Skin 6

This Name: His 7

Body Stubborn Side A: My Son's Prelude 8

Son Songs 9

Sick 10

Vegetarian Red 12

II This Name: Hers 17

My Daughter Speaks of Bitter 19

Hit Me Ghazal 20

Body Stubborn Remix: My Daughter Learns to Spin 22

Divorce Attempts to Answer My Daughter's Questions 23

Finding Glee 25

Hours After the News 26

Dear Defiance 28

Make Out Sonnet 29

The Talk 30

How to Tell My Dad that I Kissed a Man 31

Litany 33

III Portraits 39

Fragmented Venus: Odes to My Mother 43

A Body Overlapping Another 47

Body Stubborn Side B: My Father's Original Sample 48

The Next Round 49

Memento for a Mississippian 51

Closing 54

These Dead Days 55

What Did I Know 57

Brown Water Blues 58

This Name: Freddie B 62

IV Something My Sister Should Say 65

Notes 79

Acknowledgments 82

Editorial Reviews

These poems lead us from the birth cry in a hospital delivery room, to dusk and revelry in Spain, to modern-day Florida and history-laden Mississippi where Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till were slain. Even when what Brown has set out to do is grieve loss, his lines move with a buoyant, marrow-deep music, percussive and rich. They move like ‘a train, bound to a destination’ and they arrive with ‘the crackle lightning makes when it hits.'

author of Life on Mars, winner of 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry - Tracy K. Smith

From the hectic blur of family dynamics amidst raising young children, F. Douglas Brown’s Zero to Three reminds us there is much to learn about what shapes parents into better people.

The Rumpus - Samantha Duncan

F. Douglas Brown writes on behalf of the families we make and the families that make us. Poets like Robert Hayden and Elizabeth Bishop join lovers and kin in shaping his magnanimous craftsmanship and compassion. The late poet Stanley Kunitz once said he wrote about his life in order to amplify it. Likewise, this engrossing debut makes our world more vivid, transformative, and transcendent. Zero to Three is simply a triumph.

National Book Award Winner, Lighthead - Terrance Hayes

These are those rare poems that actually make you feel grateful to be a human and to have been given the privilege to love (and sometimes loathe) oneself and others in the most complicated of ways.

Poetry Northwest - Keetje Kuipers

“These poems lead us from the birth cry in a hospital delivery room, to dusk and revelry in Spain, to modern-day Florida and history-laden Mississippi where Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till were slain. Even when Brown sets out a poem to grieve loss, his lines move with a buoyant, marrow-deep music, percussive and rich. They move like ‘a train, bound to a destination’ and they arrive with ‘the crackle lightning makes when it hits.’”—Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

"From the hectic blur of family dynamics amidst raising young children, F. Douglas Brown’s Zero to Three reminds us there is much to learn about what shapes parents into better people."—Samantha Duncan, The Rumpus

From the Publisher