Proems, taut tales, small stories with rhythm and blues and grace and bruise and laughter between the lines. Brian Doyle's The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be is a book of cadenced notes on the swirl of miracle and the holy of attentiveness; a book about children and birds, love and grief and everything alive, which is to say all prayers. Brian Doyle's uncategorizable form is the brief story dressed like a poem but with the loose lyricism and verve of an essay. Here are chants and litanies, like gentle songs to the sacrament of every moment.
Product Preview
| Format: | Paperback book |
|---|---|
| Product code: | IC646519 |
| Dimensions: | 7.8" x 6.8" |
| Length: | 124 pages |
| Publisher: |
Liturgical Press
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| ISBN: | 9780814646519 |
| 1-2 copies | $14.91 each |
|---|---|
| 3-9 copies | $14.23 each |
| 10-49 copies | $13.56 each |
| 50-99 copies | $13.22 each |
| 100+ copies | $12.71 each |
Praise
Brian Doyle focuses on daily life experiences, allowing familiar stories and ordinary encounters to emerge as genuinely humorous and sad, noble and emotionally rewarding! The poems tug the heart both through story and the simplicity of superb writing. The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be is fresh and thoroughly engaging. An entrancing poetry fest!
Brian Doyle is a genius at unveiling the sacramentality of popsicles, rebounds, cedar needles, four year olds, the snap of a baseball bat, scuffling in leaves, owl feathers, attentive doctors, a pint, the chinook, old confessionals, storytelling cops, ratty jerseys. He helps us appreciate the sheer grace and blessing of our own momentous minutiae.
Author
Brian Doyle was a hirsute shambling shuffling mumbling grumbling muttering muddled maundering meandering male being who edited Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon — the best university magazine in America, according to Newsweek, and "the best spiritual magazine in the country," according to author Annie Dillard, clearly a woman of surpassing taste and discernment.
Doyle's books have four times been finalists for the Oregon Book Award, and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion, The American Scholar, and in newspapers and magazines around the world. His essays have also been reprinted in the annual Best American Essays, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. Among various honors for his work is a Catholic Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and, mysteriously, a 2008 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His greatest accomplishments are that a riveting woman said yup when he mumbled a marriage proposal, that the Coherent Mercy then sent them three lanky snotty sneery testy sweet brilliant nutty muttering children in skin boats from the sea of the stars, and that he made the all-star team in a Boston men's basketball league that was a really tough league, guys drove the lane in that league they lost fingers, man, one time a guy drove to the basket and got hit so hard his right arm fell off but he was lefty and hit both free throws, so there you go.
