LIFE, DEATH, LOVE, AND BABIES
Available now from Finishing Line Press!!
This is my first (non self)published collection and I couldn’t be more proud or excited to share it with you. It covers the roughly ten years since THIS HAS HAPPENED was released.
LIFE, DEATH, LOVE, and BABIES is a roadside monument to the totality of life. Spanning roughly ten years of David Brehmer‘s life, this prismatic collection casts a meditative gaze on everything from trauma to gun violence to parenthood to music to time itself, offering moments large and small an equal share of the spotlight. It is a celebration, an investigation, a memorial sketched with curiosity and concision.
“A deep and heartfelt reflection. A paean to finding life’s joys, commonly thought lost, David Brehmer lays it bare wrapped in gratitude for the unexpecting reader.”
–Amos White, Author and Haiku Poet, “The Sound of The Web: Haiku and Poetry on Facebook and Twitter”
“Whenever David Brehmer emails me a draft of a new poem, I sit down. I settle into an attentive, quiet, resourced place. He writes from deep into the messy heart of living, whether about the bittersweet joys of parenthood, his defiant gratitude in the smoke of a burning world, the loss of a soul brother, or life’s tiny miracles. His vivid, cutting lines don’t sort it out, dumb it down, or push it aside. I know that my soul is going to move in the power and sincerity of his words. So I sit. And read. And read again. And thank David for the deep gifts of his voice and heart.”
–Daniel Ari, author of One Way to Ask
“David Brehmer loves life, the full-blooded travesty, the blood itself, memory that spreads out like a delta. We all digress, but in poems such as “You Know” David Brehmer harnesses the wild horses of Hayden Carruth, to allow the flood of life to pour in through the cracks, it’s a garrulous, gentle, jam-packed tour de force, worth the book itself – but there is so much more – in the Whitman tradition of not only accepting our mortality, disappointment, loss, love, but embracing it, ecstatically celebrating the everythingness of existence, the wild-eyed, gobsmacking stupefaction that we exist at all. I’m a fan, you will be too.”
–Rob Lipton, former poet laureate of Richmond, CA
“In David Brehmer’s earthy debut collection, Life, Death, Love, and Babies, the everyday is rendered numinous. ‘Dirt is terribly important for many reasons, not least of which that it is fun.’ This is a poetry of quiet patterns, the accumulation of which, against all odds, form a life as these far-ranging poems constellate around “home” no matter the distance traveled. Life, Death, Love, and Babies reminds us of the wonder that is our birthright if we would only pay attention.”
–Quan Barry