Forbearance

“‘To savor the contingency of being’ could be the mission statement of Cameron Brooks’s Forbearance, a gorgeously written evocation and meditation on life lived among the prairies, orchards, flooded farms, ‘gaunt silo[s]’ of South Dakota’s High Plains. Brooks loves words and their glorious mouthfeels as much as he loves the world itself: ‘the ooze of too-ripe apples / beneath boots,’ ‘the cicada’s tymbal cry.’ In what he calls, with Stevensian grandeur, ‘the verve / of fathomless particularities, / becoming what they only could become,’ Brooks savors, with bemused forbearance and stunned adoration, all the contingent and fleeing moments of ‘the runaway chore of your life.’”

Bruce Beasley

“Cameron Brooks’s debut book is about forbearance but capably avoids falling into sepia-toned stoicism. Instead, Brooks’s collection offers a delicate, keening sense of all that is beautiful, fleeting, as well as what endures without ever becoming maudlin. The sense that time is moving as swiftly as wind through tall grass imbues these poems as in ‘McKennan’s Golden Hour’ when the narrator recounts, ‘Fretting about the coming weeks / which are by now many weeks gone by . . . ’ Brooks is also a musician, and it shows. Even the titles of the poems sound like lyrics to a song, such as ‘The Cottonwoods Were Sowing Starry Seeds,’ and they are just as pleasurable to read.”

Eliza Blue

“In lines taut as a drum or the stakes of a tent of meeting, we meet in Brooks’s Forbearance a restraint that belies an urgent strength, poems training us for some contest or some kingdom here and sure to come—as sinewy and hale a debut as I’ve seen.”

Mischa Willett