Rebbecca Brown's prose poetry collection renders birds, beasts, and surroundings from the lens of an artist who structures form with feeling. Acute observations are captured with music and tangled in emotion. Through the creation of portraits and landscapes, Brown fashions an exhibit of dynamic lyricism and word play. Speakers experience the biological as ephemeral, all the while bewildered by the promise of transformation. "I don't know what to call these, and neither will you-protest poems or tiny prose laments? But as a speaker in one of them says, it's not actions that are taboo, but the breaking of silences that surround them. And so, poet Rebbecca Brown sets out to smash them to pieces, all the dark unsaids rising up from soil and field, root and vine, barn and cell, blood and booze and loveless boys and girls to haunt our reading and contaminate our dreams. In equal measure, anguish and outrage, unsilenced, refuse to be anything but mouthy and here now in this strange and all-too familiar world where women give birth to bees, earth swells, and heat is heat. Downhome Americana has never sounded off as lyrical-or as brutal or tormented-as in the countless beating wings and throats of Brown's ecstatic testaments to our sad humanity." Katharine Haake, author of Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld and The Time of Quarantine "This book is full of terribly glorious clamor." Vanessa Baish, Entropy Magazine "Brown has crafted dreamy, sometimes nightmarish, micro-worlds that challenge the confines of three dimensions. From the onset, she delivers an intentional, intelligently snarky heft which challenges the reader to engage in self-examination." Seth Berg, South Broadway Ghost Society "The poems comprising Mouth Trap demonstrate sonic play, prosodic acrobatics, and wit both subtle and overt, sometimes in the same line." Gabriel Welsch, Heavy Feather Review "With its rich, evocative music, this book presents us with a decidedly democratic buffet completely devoid of snobbery, where no tasty word is too far off on the amuse-bouche spectrum to be excluded. To read this book is to feast!" Shane Book, author of Congotronic and Ceiling of Sticks "Mouth Trap drops the reader into a world that is at once elemental and evocative. Steinbeck would feel right at home in these gorgeously dust-filled landscapes, replete with chicken claws and cabbages, at least until the center falls away and we meet 'a lady who aged into a tumbleweed' or a character who offers 'fleeting moments and a sack of teeth.' In this artful blend of the sensuous and surreal, Rebbecca Brown delights us with her word play before she duct tapes us back to the reality that 'This is not a tome to grow old in.' Perhaps not, but Mouth Trap is a collection to savor for a good, long while." Melody Mansfield, author of The Life Stone of Singing Bird and A Bug Collection