Brownwood, like Berryman’s Henry, is a triad (I, He, You), an “other” character, con-structed within a real-life geography in an arsenal of time and place. Lawrence Bridges offers Polaroid graphics of his protagonist’s identity in the thick of our culture, amid the changing rules of fate and folly. As Elena Karina Byrne observes in her Foreword, “Brownwood is full of angst, wry humor, and sarcasm; he’s a lost twin, doppelganger, living in a melancholy place [and] this book’s poetic plot … arrives with cinematographic aplomb.” Bridges’s third volume of poems is like an autobiography of one stuck inside the vessel of who he is: “Feared as a monster, tame as a clown.”

Lawrence Bridges’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, and he is author of two previous collections, Horses on Drumsand Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2006 and 2009). He created a series of literary documentaries for the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read” initiative, and as a film director, editor, and graphic designer he has been honored for his film, music video, and advertising work with Emmy nominations and many film festival awards, including a “Gold Lion” at Cannes. He lives in Los Angeles.