Andrea Brady | Queen Mary, University of London (original) (raw)

Books by Andrea Brady

Cambridge University Press, 2021

Poetry and Bondage is a groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the history of poetic constrain... more Poetry and Bondage is a groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the history of poetic constraint. For millennia, poets have compared verse to bondage – chains, fetters, cells, or slavery. Tracing this metaphor from Ovid through the present, Andrea Brady reveals the contributions to poetics of people who are actually in bondage. How, the book asks, does our understanding of the lyric – and the political freedoms and forms of human being it is supposed to epitomise – change, if we listen to the voices of enslaved and imprisoned poets? Bringing canonical and contemporary poets into dialogue, from Thomas Wyatt to Rob Halpern, Emily Dickinson to M. NourbeSe Philip, and Phillis Wheatley to Lisa Robertson, the book also examines poetry that emerged from the plantation and the prison. This book is a major intervention in lyric studies and literary criticism, interrogating the whiteness of those disciplines and exploring the possibilities for committed poetry today.

Crater, 2016

The Strong Room collects poems found, co-produced and overheard, as charms against damage. In tim... more The Strong Room collects poems found, co-produced and overheard, as charms against damage. In times of accelerated peril the poem’s fragile stanzas can be a holding space, whose strength is too weak to contain the world, and too strong to resist it. These poems seek to build this paradoxical space of safety, pleasure, anger and danger as an expanding room for everyone who lives in love or fear.

Boiler House, 2021

Midway through life’s journey, on the margins of a burning forest, we find ourselves in a clearin... more Midway through life’s journey, on the margins of a burning forest, we find ourselves in a clearing full of pulsing machines... Poems, like anxiety, attempt to contain what spills over, and to overflow what fits too tightly. In Desiring Machines, Andrea Brady’s vital, candid eighth collection of poetry, the language of crisis gapes and sings. These poems find breathing spaces within the minutes dilated by fear, the slow ticking of grief, rage stalled and wandering, the strangely activated temporalities of illness and pain, or the long cataclysm of climate emergency. In a world sick and on fire, this fierce and vulnerable book clings to life; to the consoling possibilities for continuing in love and solidarity.

Wesleyan University Press, 2021

The Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring how the p... more The Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring how the physically intimate relationships between military drone operators and their victims are mediated, not only through the technological interfaces of the screen and drone, but also through language and subjectivity. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war' conducted from remote airbases, where pilots in shipping containers surveil and destroy remote 'objects'. Brady's approach offers a sophisticated interplay of diction, rhetoric, syntax, positioning, allusion, and sonic quality that generates legible currents of meaning and orientation. Entire countries have been turned into 'open air prisons', where the buzzing of drones overhead induces profound trauma and changes to social life. These poems strafe a documentary history of drone warfare with personal memory, and reflections on the myths and mechanics of prosthetic violence, voyeurism, masculinity, and desire. The Blue Split Compartments is a bitter comedy in drone erotics, a devastating reach into the twisted soul of murderous techno-surveillance regimes, a linguistically virtuosic and deeply humane x-ray of the discursive and militaristic systems that join us in mutual dissolution.

Book*hug, 2014

This sequence of poems responds to Höch’s photomontages, adapting and interrogating their languag... more This sequence of poems responds to Höch’s photomontages, adapting and interrogating their language of banality and exoticism to think about the passions of the 21st century. Producing, reproducing, scrutinizing and compiling, these poems seek out the horizon of unlimited freedom which recedes along the lines of the clip.

Reality Street, Sep 2013

"The logic of Brady’s position is hard to gainsay, even if sometimes one might wish her to be les... more "The logic of Brady’s position is hard to gainsay, even if sometimes one might wish her to be less rigorous. Here is a writer with all the talents, one of the most impressive lyric poets writing now in English. If her poems can be dispiriting in their cumulative effect, this is because Brady is that rarest thing, a truthful poet.... It is right to be deeply thankful for Embrace, for it is absolutely clear-eyed, a precise register of the present situation. Other poets may prattle of the spirit, rage obscenely, tend their gardens or seek tenure, but Brady’s poems are true." JOHN WILKINSON, CHICAGO REVIEW

Seagull, Dec 2012

A chronicle of motherhood and infancy, Brady’s Mutability marks the excesses of attention and lov... more A chronicle of motherhood and infancy, Brady’s Mutability marks the excesses of attention and love in this unique relationship, the gradual unfurling of one person into two. In poems and prose, these scripts offer a “model of duplicity,” revealing how the beginnings of language, the spaces which open up through movement, the undeniable possibility of harm, and the unbearable intimacy between mother and child challenge the premise of individual autonomy. Seeking “a writing of honest particularity, not clean, in a form which would catch rather than cauterize this pouring,” Mutability brilliantly captures the experience of motherhood.

Krupskaya, 2010

Wildfire is a verse essay. It is trying to persuade us, to recognize that certain catastrophes an... more Wildfire is a verse essay. It is trying to persuade us, to recognize that certain catastrophes and felicities are not inevitable. It concerns the history of incendiary devices, of the evolution of Greek fire from a divine secret which could sustain or destroy empires, into white phosphorus and napalm; the elliptical fires of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle’s service to Alexander in the fashioning of pyrotechnics, the burning/blooming/mating bodies of G. H. Schubert and the self-feeding crowds of Elias Canetti; mechanisms to project fire, to make it burn on water and stick to wood and skin, to keep it off the walls of the besieged towns, and what those mechanisms (projection and defence) have done to geometry; the courts of fire, the legal chamber and the hortus conclusus, and the margins of ambiguity where it is lobbed with impunity; embedded nuggets and embedded reporters, the discovery of the chemical element, industrial tragedy, the resistance of the matchgirls at Bryant & May, the corruption of Quaker capitalists, washing powder and toothpaste. It is an etiology of metaphors, ‘shake-n-bake’ and whisky pete and phantom fury. It is also an argument about obscurity and illumination: WP does both, smokes the bright air and singes the night with trajectories. And so an interrogation of writing practices which fume as much as they enlighten.

Routledge, 2009

Is modernity synonymous with progress? Did the Renaissance really break with the cyclical, agrari... more Is modernity synonymous with progress? Did the Renaissance really break with the cyclical, agrarian time of the Middle Ages, inaugurating a new concept of irreversible time in a secular culture defined by development? How does methodology affect scholarly responses to the idea of the future in the past? This collection of interdisciplinary essays from the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, politics and intellectual history offers new answers to these commonplace questions. They explore elite and popular culture, women and men’s experiences, and the encounter between East and West, providing a comparative view on the range of personal, political and social practices with which early modern people planned for, imagined, manipulated or even rejected the future. Examining poetry, architecture, colonial exploration, technology, drama, satire, wills, childbirth and deathbed rituals, humanism, religious radicalism and republicanism, this collection provides new readings of canonical early modern texts and insights into popular culture.

The funerary elegy was one of the most common and distinguished poetic genres of the early modern... more The funerary elegy was one of the most common and distinguished poetic genres of the early modern period. Governed by convention, elegies also provided an occasion for poets - from famous laureates to private individuals - to negotiate with the laws of mourning, religious and social expectation, and political constraints. This book situates elegy's conventions with the rituals of rhetoric and mourning. Drawing on anthropology to analyze transitional rites, charisma, and the performance of grief, it offers new readings of famous poems, as well as little-known texts published in manuscript and popular print. It recontextualizes elegies commemorating heraldic funerals and public executions, to reveal how poets asserted their independence and unique status by manipulating the rituals designed to affirm consensus and the power of the state. Examining three famous executions of the 1640s, critical elegies for other poets, and poems mourning the death of children, Brady reveals the radical potentiality of the elegiac genre. This book provides new context for canonical elegies by Ben Jonson, John Donne, Henry King and John Milton among others, and introduces a provocative set of questions about the relationship between private experience and public morality, the body and creativity, and death and writing.

This volume gathers poems from Brady’s sequence, Liberties, with many singular works published in... more This volume gathers poems from Brady’s sequence, Liberties, with many singular works published in journals or previously uncollected. It presents the first opportunity to survey the territory of her concerted effort to write out the substance, body and system, which conducts and resists the transmission of recent US power surges.

Papers by Andrea Brady

Fence, 2023

There is a form, that is not form, and that can be found in many collections of American poetry. ... more There is a form, that is not form, and that can be found in many collections of American poetry. This not-form is the arrangement. Rooted in the Romantic fragment, French prose poetry, palimpsestic modernism, Benjamin's Arcades, Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes, its unit is the line or the paragraph, whose sequence is determined by chance or free association, or by more artful choices which mimic aleatoric and dream logics. The arrangement-poem is structured as series of disparate propositions, convening under a title. It has the character of a reading journal, a bundle of apperceptions, a catalogue of surprises, an inventory of gimmicks, a cross-section of digital strata. The arrangement-poem assembles the worlds happening to the poet as a sequence of events or objects whose coherence revolves around the poet as (sometimes absent) centre. Opposed to a version of lyric as urn, it resembles lyric as box grater. You scrape a block of life against it and life-strips fall onto the plate. Diaristic, anacreontic, astonished, ironic, the arrangement-poem waits for readerly synthesis.

Nothing on Atkins , 2023

New Malden: Crater Press, 2022

The Oxford History of Poetry in English, 2022

Journal of Military History, 2006

This article discusses contemporary responses to the executions under martial law of Sir Charles ... more This article discusses contemporary responses to the executions under martial law of Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle in 1648, following General Thomas Fairfax's siege of Colchester. It compares the royalist propaganda, which established these two royalist partisans as martyred heroes, to the Parliamentary and Army propaganda, which lamented the assassination of the well-known New Model Army colonel Thomas Rainsborough two months later. Analysing newsbooks, accounts by participants and observers, and literary responses (especially the elegy), it finds that popular writers used these deaths to impugn the honour of their opponents, and consequently to argue against reconciliation or compromise.

Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900

A death in the household temporarily set a family apart. If they could afford it, early modern fa... more A death in the household temporarily set a family apart. If they could afford it, early modern families adopted mourning dress, hung escutcheons on the house and swathed rooms with black baize. The poorest families could reflect their distinction in grief through alterations of comportment, daily routine, speech and attitude. The funeral helped to reintegrate these displaced families into the community and to regulate their grief. It is generally the case that, although deep grief might be countenanced within the household as the ‘natural’ response to loss, mourners were subject to stricter discipline when they left its bounds and assumed their social roles as members of a community, congregation or class. But funeral decorum could not always contain individual displays of inventive, spontaneous and personal sorrow. And the idea that the household served as a limit for emotional display is misleading, as the space of the home was regularly filled with visitors, doctors, ministers and friends, who offered consolation and prevented the indulgence of unchristian or unhealthy melancholy in fulfilment of their neighbourly duty to the bereaved. As the accounts discussed below reveal, modern notions of public and private spaces did not apply in early modern England. David Cressy argues that ‘the early modern world allowed no separate private sphere (in the modern sense), no place where public activity did not intrude.

Cambridge University Press, 2021

Crater, 2016

Boiler House, 2021

Wesleyan University Press, 2021

Book*hug, 2014

Reality Street, Sep 2013

Seagull, Dec 2012

Krupskaya, 2010

Routledge, 2009

Fence, 2023

Nothing on Atkins , 2023

New Malden: Crater Press, 2022

The Oxford History of Poetry in English, 2022

Journal of Military History, 2006

Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900

Chicago Review, Jun 22, 2004

Chicago Review, Apr 1, 2007

Renaissance Quarterly, 2010

New Formations, 2017

'Drone Poetics' considers the challenge to the theory and practice of the lyric of the developmen... more 'Drone Poetics' considers the challenge to the theory and practice of the lyric of the development of drone warfare. It argues that modernist writing has historically been influenced by aerial technology; drones also affect notions of perception, distance and intimacy, and the self-policing subject, with consequences for contemporary lyric. Indeed, drone artworks and poems proliferate; and while these take critical perspectives on drone operations, they have not reckoned with the phenomenological implications of execution from the air. I draw out six of these: the objectification of the target, the domination of visuality, psychic and operational splitting, the 'everywhere war', the intimacy of keyhole observations, and the mythic or psychoanalytic representation of desire and fear. These six tropes indicate the necessity for a radical revision of our thinking about the practice of writing committed poetry in the drone age.

Communism and Poetry: Writing against Capital, 2019

In the first chapter of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx critiques a ‘belief in miracles’ which ‘bel... more In the first chapter of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx critiques a ‘belief in miracles’ which ‘believed the enemy to be overcome when he was only conjured away in imagination, and lost all understanding of the present in an inactive glorification of the future that was in store for it and the deeds it had in mind but did not want to carry out yet.’ This is perhaps the most famous articulation of the complex temporality of revolutionary Marxism – the vision of a future communism is subordinated to the active critique of the present which alone can bring it about.

This essay examines the radical and sometimes Gothic temporalities of Sean Bonney's poetry, in relation to communism, the figure of the crack or fissure, the experience of political defeat, and the wake work performed within the Black radical tradition - not only the music of Coltrane, but also the poetries of Amiri Baraka, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip. It also explores the alignment of Bonney's poetics with Rimbaud, Blanqui, Abiezer Coppe, and a British 'countertradition', as the manifestation of the counterclockwise temporalities of his efforts to care for the dead.

Bonney's poems draw their prosody equally from the ‘music of the law’ drummed by the police on the skull of a prisoner in a cell, and a notion of harmony drawn from the music of Coltrane. Poetry is for Bonney something which backs into the future, taking with it a revolutionary potentiality which could not be realised in the violent repression of the present. But what if – as Bonney writes – poetry does not transform itself dialectically into the voice of the crowd, and ‘all it can do is transform into the endless whacks of police clubs’? What commons can the poetry of the future predict and bring into being in the present, and what damage does poetry do or repair through its formal dialectics of waiting and resolution?

Poetry Review, 2016

A reflection on poetry in Beirut.

The Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Poetry, 2017

Renaissance funeral elegy had two primary functions: to remember the dead, and to console the liv... more Renaissance funeral elegy had two primary functions: to remember the dead, and to console the living. As a work of persuasion (of the bereaved not to grieve, or of the reader to admire the dead), it drew on classical rhetoric for guidance in the gathering and disposition of materials and their effective delivery. But as a social action-an intervention at the scene of death-determined by its occasion, it can also be read according to contemporary formalist and poststructuralist theories of genre (Miller 1984). Todorov argues that "it is because genres exist as an institution that they function as 'horizons of expectation' for readers, and as "models of writing" for authors" (Todorov 1976, 163). This essay will examine the interaction between elegy and other theological and social institutions which organized death. As an institution, elegy conforms strongly to traditions and reader expectations; but this implies a rigidity which is belied by elegists' radical disruptions of expectations in the pursuit of individual distinction: a practice which is itself generic. So for example, elegies proclaim the obvious truths that death is universal and inevitable, or that the deceased exemplifies all the expected virtues: death is always the same. But they also commend the dead person's particularity, converting the duty to memorialize into an outburst of free admiration: this death, like this poem, is different.

Modern Language Quarterly, 2016

Milton’s elegy for Edward King was widely admired and imitated in the eighteenth century. These ... more Milton’s elegy for Edward King was widely admired and imitated in the eighteenth century. These imitations tend to celebrate the poem as an ornamental, musical work, while suppressing the poem’s politics. By contrast, Samuel Johnson recognised that the poem’s prosody and its generic heterogeneity were intrinsically related to its political critique. His objections to “Lycidas” also reflected his view that pastoral depicted an idealised life of rural leisure to distract and entertain city men. This ancient association between pastoral and leisure may have informed eighteenth-century readers’ delight in the poem’s “ease and variety”, but it is also a fundamental misreading of the ethics of labor set out in the poem. In its enactment of the spiritual and writerly work of the shepherd, in Milton’s revisions, and in its monodic form, “Lycidas” offers readers a choice between sensual dalliance and arduous song. Monody was both a collective song, performed during work to relieve its strains, and an individual utterance. This form reasserts the labor idealised by pastoral as a spiritual necessity. The eighteenth-century reception of “Lycidas” reveals how the revolutionary potential of lyric was converted to entertainment, a moment whose legacies may be perceived in some contemporary theories of lyric.

Presented at Donald Winnicott and the History of the Present (Roehampton University)