Praise for Blue Collar Fathers

Jason Lee Brown’s Blue Collar Fathers is built of blunt beautiful talk about work. But the book also hums with love, as poetry should—the poems themselves doing their jobs to balance force with tenderness. Fathers, grandfathers, brothers, blue-collar men all—their lives as work and more work—but also children and husbands who grow and die. Ultimately, Brown is a caretaker of family and of the emotions of which our days are made.
           Chris Green, author of The Sky Over Walgreens and Epiphany School.

As the title implies, there is a tender roughness to these poems, a rough tenderness. When Jason Lee Brown writes of the "welding scars like smashed strawberries" that mark the arms of his father and grandfather, we know we are witness to the labor of hardworking men transformed into something new and wonderful. Yet, the poems themselves represent a different kind of labor; they are the work of making meaning from the past, from generations and regeneration, from manliness and violence and fear, and the craft of living beneath the great wide sky of the Midwest.
           Jeffrey Thomson, author of Birdwatching in Wartime and Renovation

Blue Collar Fathers is a lovely investigation into the tender lineage of men constrained by the harshness of manual labor; this brutality underscored by brusque declaratives: “The obituary clerk doesn’t give a shit what time you die.” As Brown two-steps between gentleness (a boy piggybacking his hurt father) and severity (a man hit by a train), he is capable of startling imagistic allure—“It’s late and the red storm in the distance / crackles across the top of the cornstalks.” And like the red storm, these poems quietly seethe, all the while swelling with fire.

Simone Muench, author of Orange Crush and Lampblack & Ash

How refreshing to read some poems and short prose that remind us of our common but lost heritage in work, in work done with the hands, with the shoulders and back—with hammers and pliers, shovels and rakes.  With his unpretentious and honest words, Jason Lee Brown celebrates not only his father and the father before him, but our historical fathers as well.  In doing so, he places himself in the tradition of Whitman and Williams, Sandburg and Frost, all of whom celebrated the deep connection between our democracy, work, and poetry itself.

Bruce Guernsey, author of New England Primer and January Thaw

The poems in this collection are both elegy for a passing way of life and affirmation for the kind of men that life created.  In them, Brown applies the flat, plain language of his Midwestern subjects brilliantly.  These poems pull no punches when they tell us, “The obituary clerk doesn’t give a shit what time you die” or that the speaker and his cousins carried their grandfather’s casket as if they “were just moving furniture around.”  Yet there is beauty in this stark landscape as well, as in the moment “The lightning bugs blinked awake / like a solar system craving heat.”  Within these narrative poems, Brown’s training in both fiction and poetry twine together and create a cast of characters any of us might meet on the streets of a small town where agriculture and industry overlap and both struggle.  Brown captures with great acumen the silent, Midwestern men who bottle their emotions until the pressure demands release and they mimic the sudden violent weather known to shatter summer skies.

Sandy Longhorn, author of Blood Almanac

Let me say it plainly. Jason Lee Brown is the best poet to come out of the small, rural towns of Illinois since Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters. In Blue Collar Fathers you'll only find real lives, real mud, real flowers. If you want high-toned froppery or over-blown fluff look elsewhere.

John Guzlowski, author of Lightning and Ashes

BLUE COLLAR FATHERS // JASON LEE BROWN

About the Author

Jason Lee Brown teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University and is co-Series Editor, with Jay Prefontaine, of New Stories from The Midwest (Ohio University Press). His writing has been nominated for six Pushcart Prizes and recently appeared in The Literary Review, The Journal, Ecotone, Natural Bridge, Post Road, Tar River Poetry, and more.  He received honors from the Illinois Arts Council, Academy of American Poets and the Playboy College Fiction Contest. He is finishing a novel about the infamous Mad Gasser of Mattoon.

To read an interview by and of Jason Lee Brown, click here.