Boney-Fingered Reach for God

Poetry May 2023 ISBN 978-1-936628-99-5 80 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

"Boney-Fingered Reach for God is a remarkable debut, a testament to Mark Brown's striking imagination, energetic vocabulary, and devotion to intense love relationships. This three-part work is fueled as well by the poet's appreciation for the bizarre in historical situations, culminating in poems that literally radiate around the life of Marie Curie. Brown's vulnerable investigations of love and his wacky narratives are made all the more vibrant by the poet's metaphorical skill. It is bittersweet that the gracefully sequenced Boney-Fingered Reach for God is also Mark Brown's posthumous signature, the life of a poet cut short."—Molly Peacock, author of A Friend Sails in on a Poem

faith love

From the Book

Dracula Courts His Next Ex-Wife

Can you hear the mushroom cloud
of angels choir? They drone for you.
Look through their swathes, their skin,
to their ichorous veins engorged with nectar.
Count each blood feather
while I wipe the spittle
from your chin. I bequeath to you

hunger from the famine in my bones,
from the dust of Hammurabi's Code,
the parchment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The elements have warped your marrow,
unswirled your fingertips.
Remove your spoke from the karmic
wheel and the spark will not decay.

Luminesce, Marie, luminesce! You need
no sun to melt your wings. The night will wick
the shimmer from your core, and I will siphon
the blight from your veins. Like the aurora borealis,
you'll irradiate        at dusk.
Open a wrist. Part a Red Sea.
Unhinge your jaw, Lover, and feed.

What Others Say

Boney-Fingered Reach for God is a remarkable debut, a testament to Mark Brown's striking imagination, energetic vocabulary, and devotion to intense love relationships. This three-part work is fueled as well by the poet's appreciation for the bizarre in historical situations, culminating in poems that literally radiate around the life of Marie Curie. Brown's vulnerable investigations of love and his wacky narratives are made all the more vibrant by the poet's metaphorical skill. It is bittersweet that the gracefully sequenced Boney-Fingered Reach for God is also Mark Brown's posthumous signature, the life of a poet cut short.

— Molly Peacock , author of A Friend Sails in on a Poem

Mark's fellow writers called him the poetry god. This book reminds me why. He was a master of image and of crushing despair as well. Kids, cold, hard as marbles, used her for their blood raw laughs and … in the middle of the rape, I see the watch around your wrist, the band constricting tufts of hair. I wonder what time Christ will come; how long until the resurrection? He could pull a poem out of anywhere, like a tulip out of a pocket. Hearing Mark read an image from "Summers with Danny and Susan" has stayed with me these many years: They appeared each June—libation just before I turned to dust, two little towhead saviors peering over the station wagon dash like prairie dogs.

— E. Gail Chandler , author of He Read to Us

What do the characters in Mark Brown's Bony-Fingered Reach for God have in common? An abused boy, a gay man in Kentucky, a Southern granny, a brilliant woman scientist, and Dracula, that icon, that ultimate terrible boyfriend: What connects them? Loneliness, sure, but also fierce individuality, a kind of boldness even in regret, definitely regret. The poems are like that too. They're sad but funny, traditional in form but unique in subject and voice, full of unexpected descriptions and surprising half-rhymes. They're confident: not swaggering but sure of themselves, like the characters in them who claim space for themselves even if they're not accepted, even if they regret some of what they've given up to be exactly who they are.

— Amy Watkins , author of Lucky and Wolf Daughter

About the Author

Mark Russell Brown

Mark Russell Brown (1963-2011), from Louisville, Kentucky, received his MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. His work can be found in The Louisville Review, BloodLotus, Bloom, as well as in Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems. He was a long-standing member of the Green River Writers.