Building Brownville

by Tyler Jacobs

Overview

Building Brownville explores forms of grief through the internalization of experience and wanders further to wonder if the past is too far away to fix the present while also serving as a love letter to Nebraska. This collection offers a millennial voice within poetry––a voice that not only subverts the norm of what poetry is but defies the stereotypes of a region, offering connection through grief, love, and place––to experience a somewhere which we have never been.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781622882403
Publisher:	Stephen F. Austin University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2022
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

TYLER MICHAEL JACOBS was born and raised in central Nebraska. He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Kearney and works for the Nebraska Writers Collective as a Teaching Artist. He lives in Kearney, Nebraska.

Table of Contents

Bone Teeth 11

I

After Don Welch 15

Notes on Tomorrow 16

Gunmetal 18

Light Switch 20

What I Heard 21

On the Farm 22

Smudges 23

Threading Carpet 24

Building Brownville 26

II

As from the Mystery 29

To Nebraska 30

Notes on Yesterday 31

In the Shower 32

She has Gotten Really Good at Hiding the Fact That She Smokes Cigarettes 34

Routine's Mornings 36

Woman Embroidering 38

Harvest 40

Nebraska Is Full of Barren Trees 42

Poking Holes in Butter Dish Lids 43

III

Building Brownville 46

Mise en Place 47

White Lilies 49

Standing Water in Central Nebraska 51

Duplex 52

Toadstool 53

Jars of Fresh Air 54

What You Heard 55

Sedimentary 56

Elegy 57

IV

Maple 61

In 1999, I Sit at the Kitchen Table and Watch My Father Open Mail Before I Go to Live with My Mother 62

Lebanon, Nebraska 63

A Portrait of My Mother 64

Like Prayer 65

Something to Get Lost In 66

How to Sand and Varnish Floorboards 68

June 21: Poem for Kearney 70

Catch 71

Building Brownville 72

Notes 73

Acknowledgments 75