Description:
Requiem for Used Ignition Cap by J. Scott Brownlee, which was selected as the winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize by C. Dale Young, explores the rural landscape and residents of Brownlee's native Llano, Texas. Brownlee might be a considered a natural mystic, finding in the particulars of place the vehicles of transcendence.
Review Quotes:
"Devotion, whether in poetry or prayer, requires one to pay attention. From the very first poem of this collection to the last, J. Scott Brownlee does exactly that. Whether it is the landscapes of Texas, soldiers home from Iraq, or the awkward ways in which we relate to each other, these poems pay close attention to details and transform them into something organic, whole, and incredibly moving."
-C. Dale Young, judge of The 2015 Orison Poetry Prize
"J. Scott Brownlee's Requiem for Used Ignition Cap pulses with imagery that grounds and levitates mind and body [. . .]. This collection, honed and shaped, is woven from ordinary lives and dreams, and each trope honors the earth we walk upon. There's a feeling in this collection-voices and rituals that spark the landscape. Brownlee juxtaposes mind and spirit, and there's nowhere these poems don't dare to go."
-Yusef Komunyakaa
"The violence of men, the delicacy of their broken bodies, the religiosity of the town that raised them: all of these influence Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, which documents an America we rarely see. In J. Scott Brownlee's Llano, high school football heroes become PTS-affected war vets. The rural dead sing from the hollow flutes their bones leave in the dust. These are poems whose language begins with the body and the land. For Brownlee, the two are inseparable."
-Dorianne Laux