The Desires of Letters

"Motherhood and housewifery and other worldly concerns of the female artist-provider ride rampant here in this bustling exploding book of prose & poem meditations. Laynie Browne tells it 'slant.' These are the erotics of our letters (alphabetic duty) working for us as well as epistles to the world that capture & hold synaptic energy, quotidian urgency & secret delight. I feel like 'personism' came back into the neighborhood. Onward & outward from Basra to dream realms to jaunts of imagination and friendship. One of our best writers does it again."—Anne Waldman

"This book is such a perfect fantasy. It is an homage to Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters. But as it is written by Laynie Browne, it is a different book. And yet it is just as transformative and all that I loved so much about the original book—its negotiation of the global and the domestic, beauty made bittersweet with annoyance and exhaustion, all that advice about how to raise a child and write at the same time—is there. I’ve long thought of The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters as a sort of handbook to having it all. And yet I also knew there was so much more to learn. So I am grateful to be able to also have The Desires of Letters."—Juliana Spahr

"Laynie Browne's epistolary essay-poems are a direct homage to Bernadette Mayer's The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, but they are also a tribute to many other writers, from Henry James to Proust to Stein, as referenced in the book's twenty-plus alternative titles. The book presents an intimate and compelling look at the female artist through subject matter that is at times domestic, at times political, and often both at once. While on occasion facing, and writing through, isolation and exhaustion: 'Have to call everybody birthday can’t keep up with cards or the season or planning parties or have anything clean to wear or unpacking suitcases, or thoughts or that dash of connectiveness,' this collection nevertheless reaches constantly toward connectivity, invoking family, friends, and mentors while culling literature, news, and personal anecdotes to make meaning from the daily negotiations between self and surroundings."—Poets.org