GHOST OF A PERSON PASSING IN FRONT OF THE FLAG: POEMS by D.F. Brown
Description
D.F. Brown served as a medic in the Binh Dinh v province of Vietnam. With GHOST, he returns to these two places, often co-mingling them into someplace both dreamlike and known, equally combustive by the delirium of memory—“a swarm smeared across the page.” The collection calls for us to pause and remember, so that we can reckon with both the horrors of our collective past and the necessity of witness, of being there, even if we were lucky enough not to be. To respect the chaos of war and real lives that were lost, W.D. Ehrhart calls D.F. Brown’s poems “jagged, jarring, disturbing, unsettling…[t]hey confound time and geography. All the while “haunting, baffling, troubling” us, and because of their pure intentions, able to wring out beauty and redemption from even the bleakest moments, those “roses through chainlink.” John Balaban praised GHOST, as “one of the best books to come out of that war.”
In GHOST, Brown calls upon his powers, reveling in the sanctity of language that reveals the worst in us—but also heals and transforms, reminding us that “words silhouette what we cannot keep.”
Photo credits: Paula N. Luu @ Houston Creative Space
About the author
Born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks, D.F. Brown served as a medic with Bravo, 1/14th Infantry in Vietnam, 1969–70. Educated at the University of Missouri and San Francisco State University, he is the author of Returning Fire, The Other Half of Everything, and Assuming Blue. His work has been anthologized in American War Poetry, Carrying the Darkness, and Unaccustomed Mercy. Brown lives in Houston.