Brushes With
Chapbook. Poetry
Limited edition of 150 copies
5"x7", 40 pp, pbk | October 2010
Cover art by Jono Tosch
$10 includes shipping in the U.S.
Click here to order by check.
Or order through PayPal:
.
Praise for Brushes With
"Reading these charming, brave, shiny, and sad poems, a reader quickly discovers what a pleasure it is to “go up” to them, ready for anything to happen, and then step away feeling, as Kenneth Koch wrote, “puzzled, / Distressed, and illuminated, ready to believe / It is curious to be alive.” Brushes With is positively bursting with imagination, and the delighted language Emily Toder has shaped invites and rewards our attention at every turn. We are a lucky world to receive her book."
—Heather Christle
If geometry approaches shapes in space, and poetry approaches shapes in thought & if these combine to acknowledge one another's significance and affinities in human nature's never-ending wandering, then what we have been given is the genius and pleasure of Emily Toder's poetry.
—Dara Wier
Poems from Brushes With
may be found in Bird Dog, Sixth Finch, jubilat, New Ohio Review, and Stop Sharpening Your Knives.
There was an oval in the river and I went up to it
it was a subtle oval very couth and formfit
there was an inner light coming from it
and that light was lighting the river
I fastened my boat to a tree
stomped on my torch in the light of the oval
my face lit up and the oval took it on
I stayed there talking to myself for a little while
the tree grew light it was draping over the oval
I told this to myself
and the sky over the oval grew light
I sung the oval’s praises
You must be some sort of god I told it
You flatter yourself it replied
I thought
I may be flattered I said
but you are flatter
It rumbled and the moon rose to meet me
rousing the sun at the same time
so that the light was wrong
and to invoke mortality
a live fish in my boat flopped
and its eyes glazed
No, you are flatter
said the now very clean oval
About the Author
Emily Toder is a translator, letterpress printer and New Yorker living in Northampton, Mass., where she attends library school and runs the small Nor By Press. Her translation of Edgar Bayley’s short fiction is forthcoming from Clockroot Books.
Upcoming Readings and Events
for Emily Toder and Brushes With
October 10, 2010, Turners Falls, MA
Slope Series
Featuring James Haug and Emily Toder
5pm @ Rendezvous 78 3rd Street
others coming soon . . .
