Faun
“The book flinches like a school of fish, a murmuration, a murder nation, my colonizer's baby handprint on a paneled wall in a farmhouse in Ovid, Michigan. The book unearths burial mounds and flattens them into fields. My ancestors removed the bones, and I removed arrowheads from the creek, and I held them to my heart, and I searched the grass for blood, but all I saw was a starling. She hid her eggs in my chest, and when I drifted to sleep I saw black-winged, nameless shadows.
This is the Book of Lily.”
In Faun, Brandi George explores the sudden erasure of human and nonhuman populations from her hometown of Ovid, Michigan. Embodying various voices, forms, and media, a young girl named Lily undergoes a series of transformations guided by nymphs, flora, and fauna. A reworking of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Faun also reflects on the themes of sexual violence that often occur in the mythic.
Brandi George has written three books. Her most recent collection of poetry, The Nameless, is available for pre-order from Kernpunkt Press, and the official publication date is August, 2023. Her first book of poetry, Gog (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), won the gold medal in the Florida Book Awards, and her second collection, Faun, is a play in verse (Plays Inverse, 2019). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Fence, Orion, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Iowa Review. She has been awarded residencies at Hambidge Center for the Arts and the Hill House ISLAND residency, and the Time & Place Award in France. She is currently working on a collection of poems titled “Involution,” which will include paintings by the visual artist, Dana Roes. She teaches writing at FSW in Fort Myers, Florida.
