City Nave: Poems

By Betsy K. Brown

In City Nave, Betsy K. Brown explores the architecture of buildings, poems, and souls. Shape makes meaning--in the ornate corridors of cathedrals, the stark expanse of airports, the tidy monastic cells of sonnets, the spiraling stairs of terza rima, and the cluttered corners of memory. City Nave walks the reader through these places in an ongoing search for stories, stability, and sustenance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: May 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385214013

Betsy K. Brown

Betsy K. Brown is a poet, essayist, and curriculum writer. Her work has appeared in many outlets, including First Things, New Ohio Review, and The CiRCE Institute website. She is the author of Leading a Seminar on Frankenstein.

Book preview

City Nave

Poems

Betsy K. Brown

city nave

Poems

Copyright ©

2024

Betsy K. Brown. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

, Eugene, OR

97401

.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 979-8-3852-1399-3

hardcover isbn: 979-8-3852-1400-6

ebook isbn: 979-8-3852-1401-3

04/19/24

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

I. Stairs

Dark Ages

The Former Valley of Ashes, 2019

Ode to the Original Penn Station

Basilique du Sacré-Coeur

From the Basement of the Interior Castle

Friendship: An Interlude

To a Ripe June Strawberry

This Tale

Phoenix after Nearby Fire

Saint Monica

Of the Baptized Apostate Hiking in Drought

To Mums

Raskolnikov in New York City

Saint John the Unfinished

To My Brother-in-Law in Kiev from a Plane over Texas

II. Narthex

Eulogy to the First Ms. Brown

The Lindisfarne Gospels: Saint John

In Utero

To a Six-Year-Old on Fifth Avenue

Food in the Desert

Gaudete

Entanglement Theory

A Young Hummingbird

Manhattan

Pupils

Plane God

Sonnet by Those Who Stay Behind

III. Nave

Poetry and Postulancy

To a Cutter, Age 14

Untangling

Clouds

Epiphany

The Art of Loving

Liturgy

Bird, Gift

Typesetting

Cursive

Entertaining

Saint Joseph

Barefoot at Low Tide, Kennebunkport, Maine

Ash Wednesday in Maui

City Nave

IV. Altar

Eclipse Glasses

Be Fruitful and Multiply

Two Ways to Be a Flame

Trappist Abbey after Rain

Promised Lands

Volleyball

Turbulence

Buying a House on the Feast of Saint Francis

"The poems in City Nave twist and slither off the page, never still, ablaze one breath and ashen the next, here admonishing, there searching, always, like a Phoenix, fiery, always re-birthing."

—Mischa Willett,

author of The Elegy Beta

"This poetry collection by Betsy K. Brown is something worth sitting up and noticing. Brown writes poems with an easy, contemporary sensibility that’s like chatting with someone you know and like. But wait a second! There’s something more. Formal structures and old ways, long forgotten ideas, the scent of the ruins of a civilization we once knew.