Writing | Editing | Performance | Teaching
Air whooshed into the car when Brian opened the passenger side door of my ’96 Ford Taurus and stuck his Doc Marten boot out above the moving pavement. Brian’s Doc Martens were hand-me-downs, scuffed and cracked and almost grey with age, the yellow laces laced all the way up and wrapped several times before being tied around Brian’s skinny leg just above the ankle, his cuffed jeans lifting as he stretched one leg out of the door.
The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives. In a review of Yesterday Won’t Goodbye, Jeanann Verlee writes, “His poems speak with an unbridled urgency yet come to you patient, coy, brimming with wisdom—and acutely aware of their own necessity.”
Hamish lived on the opposite side of the country from his family, but he had never been on an airplane, he had moved by train. He was a romantic, but this time, there was urgency; his grandfather had died. So Hamish called the airplane company to purchase a ticket which he was told would be at the counter when he went. The airport was so much bigger than Hamish knew.