Desiring Machines by Andrea Brady

Midway through life’s journey, on the margins of a burning forest, we find ourselves in a clearing full of pulsing machines...

 Poems, like anxiety, attempt to contain what spills over, and to overflow what fits too tightly. In Desiring Machines, Andrea Brady’s vital, candid eighth collection of poetry, the language of crisis gapes and sings. These poems find breathing spaces within the minutes dilated by fear, the slow ticking of grief, rage stalled and wandering, the strangely activated temporalities of illness and pain, or the long cataclysm of climate emergency. In a world sick and on fire, this fierce and vulnerable book clings to life; to the consoling possibilities for continuing in love and solidarity.

When the time comes you are holding on

to a facsimile of hope: that beneath your feet

there is a landing, vulnerable fruit caught

in a net; that the interval between struggle and arrival

is just space, empty space, no complexities.

This is another way of talking

about being born ...