The News

May 18, 2015
Brown, a correspondent on PBS NewsHour, records the sentiments of a life spent in TV news in his debut collection. Sardonic, excited, appalled, or simply exhausted, the spare, honest poems at first tell “the story we know to be true.” Brown reported from Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, Beirut during civil war in Lebanon (“Hezbollah by day, Dunkin’ Donuts at night”), and Wisconsin during “Campaign 2012” (as one poem is titled), where “there are twenty-three voters/ yet to make up their minds.” When the headlines recede, Brown’s poetry turns to the old age and death of his father, in a series marked by a moving restraint: “One morning state police/ escort us to your grave/ the next my flight is canceled.// Maintenance issues breaking/ out all over.” Brown’s winning afterword sets the “greedy monster” of his day job beside the avocation of verse—not the same as reportage, but not quite separate from it either. His clear poems blend familiar self-accusation with forthright defenses of his trade: such writing will hold the interest of readers who want to know more about broadcast journalism and the thoughts of a broadcast journalist—one who has done much to put present-day verse prominently on the small screen.

May 1, 2015
Brown's experiences before the relentless eye of the camera and within the churn and pressure of the perpetual news cycle as an Emmy Awardwinning journalist and chief arts and culture correspondent for PBS' NewsHour shapes his strikingly forthright poems. Brown's directness is professional in origin, but he is keenly aware of and haunted by what's missing from the news, which is why he seeks another angle in poetry. He also loves language's subtleties and poetry's license to imagine and writes with spare lyricism and barbed wit about the consequences of a presidential campaign, war, and Haiti's devastating earthquake. In Beirut, he observes, Hezbollah by day, Dunkin' Donuts at night. In a Haiti-set poem, the speaker, a journalist, admits, we are here to show the horror of your life. Brown pays tribute to fallen soldiers and shares startling gleanings from interviews with the likes of Richard Avedon and Philip Roth. In this crisp, frank, compassionate, and perceptive first collection, Brown writes, Wereporters, anchorsborrow daily / switching between the breathlessness / of the new' and nothing new under the sun'. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)