The Scented Fox

"I’ve been persuaded by the poems’ psyches to lose myself, to forget the existence of anything outside the mind ... anything concrete enough to become a physical obstacle to stability, awareness, or wisdom. Laynie Browne is my new best friend."—Melinda Wilson, Coldfront

"A conclusion fixes fate and form, implies logical order toward completion—that the path to transformation was linear and finite. The world of The Scented Fox aims to be shifting and boundless, syntactically challenging: awestruck at the infinite possibilities of its linguistic landscape. More, it seems awestruck at the infinite possibilities of the female form: how once freed from the constraints of “Those-He,” of the story forced upon her, the female form can be a thousand things and one thing at once...The poems in this book do not offer conclusions. It is up to the reader to complete each tale, to both listen and become storyteller, to cross the invisible boundary laid between audience and poet—between one mind and another."—Sarah Johnson, Zoland Poetry

“How might starlight be constructed?” Laynie Browne asks in a poem in her new book, The Scented Fox. The book itself seems to ask how a luminous tale—folk or fairy or otherwise—is constructed or composed. This collection is made up of prose and verse forms, letters, interrupted sequences, and a “dictionary.” The poet goes in search of that slippery idea of a tale, not in any direct or linear way, but rather by falling backwards into a colorful map as it becomes aware of its own conditions."—Molly Bendall, Lana Turner Journal