The Scented Fox

By Laynie Browne

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• Laynie Browne’s seventh collection emerges from reconstructed tales and dreams. In these fragmented poetic spells, characters disappear and re-emerge, their charms reconfigured, their stories unraveling, their resolutions elusive.
  
  National Poetry Series winner selected by Alice Notley.

• I’ve been persuaded by the poems’ psyches to lose myself, to forget the existence of anything outside the mind ... anything concrete enough to become a physical obstacle to stability, awareness, or wisdom. Laynie Browne is my new best friend.
  Melinda Wilson, Coldfront
  
  A conclusion fixes fate and form, implies logical order toward completion--that the path to transformation was linear and finite. The world of The Scented Fox aims to be shifting and boundless, syntactically challenging: awestruck at the infinite possibilities of its linguistic landscape. More, it seems awestruck at the infinite possibilities of the female form: how once freed from the constraints of “Those-He,” of the story forced upon her, the female form can be a thousand things and one thing at once...The poems in this book do not offer conclusions. It is up to the reader to complete each tale, to both listen and become storyteller, to cross the invisible boundary laid between audience and poet--between one mind and another.
  Sara Johnson, Zoland Poetry
  
  “How might starlight be constructed?” Laynie Browne asks in a poem in her new book, The Scented Fox. The book itself seems to ask how a luminous tale--folk or fairy or otherwise--is constructed or composed. This collection is made up of prose and verse forms, letters, interrupted sequences, and a “dictionary.” The poet goes in search of that slippery idea of a tale, not in any direct or linear way, but rather by falling backwards into a colorful map as it becomes aware of its own conditions.
  Molly Bendall, Lana Turner
  
  As I was reading, I felt a strange sense of familiarity, as though I had stumbled across these concepts and ideas before without ever being able to pinpoint it. Her tales in miniature section is an incredibly interesting concept. She writes a fairytale in three words.
  Save Ophelia

• Laynie Browne is the author of numerous collections of poetry and one novel. Her publications include The Desires of Letters (Counterpath Press, 2010) and Roseate, Points of Gold (dusie books, 2010), as well as The Scented Fox (Wave Books, 2007), Daily Sonnets (Counterpath Press, 2007) and Drawing of a Swan Before Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2005).
  
  Her honors include: winner of the National Poetry Series, of the Contemporary Poetry Series, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize Nomination. Her work has been anthologized in Not For Mothers Only (Fence Books), Wreckage of Reason, An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers, (Spuytenduyvil), and in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, U.K.).
  
  With others she has co-curated various reading series including the Ear Inn reading series in New York, the Subtext Series in Seattle, and now as part of the POG reading series Tucson Arizona. She has taught creative writing at The University of Washington, Bothell, at Mills College in Oakland and at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, where she is currently the Elementary Education Coordinator.