Practice Has No Sequel

Practice Has No Sequel is a book of prose poems, meditations on time, perception, loss and bafflement, which follows her earlier volume P R A C T I C E. This book is a study of perception which attempts to bring awareness to metacognition. Facets of investigation include: contemplative practice, liminal space, the uncanny, dislocation as well as the realm of visionary, and artistic practice. What do we practice by default when attention lapses? How to write that which is beyond language, unsayable, yet simultaneously compose? This book is an homage text for the poet Leslie Scalapino.

Noted poet, writer, and Soto Zen priest Norman Fischer shares his insights on the book, stating, “Practice Has No Sequel, describes so well the delicious perplexing unspeakable inner life— my life/everyone's life—we didn't know we were living until we read it here! Laynie Browne plunges her reader into your inside mind—which is everywhere in the world and simultaneously uncharted. In elegant sentences full of stuttering music and sumptuous imagery (similar to her visual collages), Browne patiently feels her way in the dark as she works through shattering pain to the particular sort of healing only art provides. “If personhood — like every prophetess burning — reconstitutes — antiseptic like crying — go inside that prism — of inner quiet. Hear steps above your head — and nowhere — begin. Again. We are all going — like regions of roses — sonatas come apart — mended by countless hands.”

n addition, distinguished poet, educator, and feminist performer Kristin Prevallet writes: “If a sentence can create worlds that exist only in the syntax of stories, then a sentence can also open like the folds of a rose, to reveal the periphery where worlds exist beyond story as energies, dreams, visualizations, messages of wisdom, ghosts, and emotions which the body coils through in this “seance of being” we call life. Laynie Browne’s Practice Has No Sequel is a book that captures the periphery in the present moment and stitches sentences to fill the gaps between what is known and unknown, speakable and unconscious, story and illusion. An eco-somatic and healing journey formally stitched together with Emily Dickinson’s dashes, this book reveals language’s connection to the world of forms, “where we revel in larger fields.”