The Blue Split Compartments
The Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring the relationships between military drone operators and their victims. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war.'
Wesleyan, 2021, 92pp
Desiring Machines
Poems, like anxiety, attempt to contain what spills over, and to overflow what fits too tightly. In Desiring Machines, Andrea Brady’s vital, candid eighth collection of poetry, the language of crisis gapes and sings. These poems find breathing spaces within the minutes dilated by fear, the slow ticking of grief, rage stalled and wandering, the strangely activated temporalities of illness and pain, or the long cataclysm of climate emergency. In a world sick and on fire, this fierce and vulnerable book clings to life; to the consoling possibilities for continuing in love and solidarity. Midway through life’s journey, on the margins of a burning forest, we find ourselves in a clearing full of pulsing machines.
Boiler House, 2021, 62pp
The Strong Room
The Strong Room collects poems found, co-produced and overheard, as charms against damage. In times of accelerated peril the poem’s fragile stanzas can be a holding space, whose strength is too weak to contain the world, and too strong to resist it. These poems seek to build this paradoxical space of safety, pleasure, anger and danger as an expanding room for everyone who lives in love or fear.
Crater, 2016, 66pp
Mutability: Scripts for Infancy
A chronicle of motherhood and infancy, Andrea Brady’s Mutability marks the excesses of attention and love in this unique relationship, the gradual unfurling of one person into two. In poems and prose, these scripts offer a 'model of duplicity', revealing how the beginnings of language, the spaces which open up through movement, the undeniable possibility of harm and the intimacy between mother and child challenge the premise of individual autonomy.
Seagull, 2013, 110pp
Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination
Wildfire is a verse essay. It is trying to persuade us, to recognize that certain catastrophes and felicities are not inevitable. It concerns the history of incendiary devices, of the evolution of Greek fire from a divine secret which could sustain or destroy empires, into white phosphorus and napalm; the courts of fire, the legal chamber and the hortus conclusus, and the margins of ambiguity where it is lobbed with impunity; embedded nuggets and embedded reporters, the discovery of the chemical element, industrial tragedy, washing powder and toothpaste. It is also an argument about obscurity and illumination: WP does both, smokes the bright air and singes the night with trajectories. And so an interrogation of writing practices which fume as much as they enlighten.
Krupskaya, 2010
Cut from the Rushes
"The logic of Brady’s position is hard to gainsay, even if sometimes one might wish her to be less rigorous. Here is a writer with all the talents, one of the most impressive lyric poets writing now in English. If her poems can be dispiriting in their cumulative effect, this is because Brady is that rarest thing, a truthful poet.... It is right to be deeply thankful for Embrace, for it is absolutely clear-eyed, a precise register of the present situation. Other poets may prattle of the spirit, rage obscenely, tend their gardens or seek tenure, but Brady’s poems are true." JOHN WILKINSON, CHICAGO REVIEW
Reality Street Editions, 2013, 134pp
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Dompteuse (Book*hug, 2014)
A series of poems in response to the collages by German Dadaist Hannah Höch.
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Vacation of a Lifetime (Salt, 2001)
Effecting an off-site sifting of virulently sexualized, life-style-propping policies that kill people, Andrea Brady takes readers on a Vacation of a Lifetime, her first book of poems. Brady works past First World lies and representations, taking idioms and ideology and warping them back from outside. Throughout, the book’s deep engagement with lyric as valid and viable cultural expression, despite its imperial history in English, evinces a belief in imagining other truths.—Publishers Weekly
Reviews
Jennifer Cooke, 'The Violations of Empathy', New Formations 89/90 (Autumn/Winter 2016)
Niamh O'Mahony, "'Releasing the Chaos of Energies': Communicating the Concurrences in Trevor Joyce's Appropriative Poems', Irish University Review 46/1 (2016): 119-131
Lucy Collins, ‘An etiology of metaphors: toxic discourse and poetic form in Andrea Brady’s Wildfire,’ Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (Dec. 2016)
Michael Peverett, ‘Andrea Brady: Cut from the Rushes, etc.’, Intercapillary Space (October 2015)
Sophie Read, ‘Awake for Ever: An Essay’, prac crit 1 (July 2014)
Gareth Prior, ‘The Fault of Language’, Garethprior.org, 29 July 2014
Ashleigh Lambert, Review of Mutability, The Rumpus (8 January 2014)
Andrew Spragg, Review of Cut from the Rushes, HixEros (January 2014)
Vicky Sparrow, Review of Mutability, The Literateur (6 December 2013)
David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time and Locale (Liverpool University Press, 2013)
Jeremy Noel-Tod and Ian Hamilton, eds., The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English, second ed. (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Brian M. Reed, ‘Andrea Brady’s Peculiar Dissidence’, in Nobody's Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013)
Joel Duncan, ‘She Has Been Enlisted in the Choir Under Compulsion’, Notre Dame Review 36 (Summer/Fall 2013): 207-210
Mandy Bloomfield, ‘Revolution in Spatial Poetics’, at ‘Poetry and Revolution’ (Birkbeck 2012)
Ange Mlinko, Review of Wildfire, Chicago Review 56.4 (Winter 2012): 122-124
Alex Latter, ‘Extraordinary Renditions: Voicing Opposition to War,’ Alluvium, 1.6 (1 November 2012)
John Sears, ‘Andrea Brady's Wildfire: Generation’, Temporel: revue littéraire & artistique (29 April 2012)
‘Some Short Foule Field Notes: John DeWitt, Lisa Jeschke, Andrea Brady, 14th Cambridge, January 2012’
Jennifer Cooke, ‘Poetry and Knowledge: the Exhibition of Andrea Brady’s Wildfire’; Scott Thurston, ‘Talking Poetics: Dialogues in Innovative Poetry’; Romana Huk, ‘New British Schools’ – all at ‘Legacies of Modernism: The State of British Poetry Today’, UFR Etudes-Anglophones, Université Paris-Diderot, 9-11 June 2011.
Review of Wildfire by Catherine Wagner, Poetry Project Newsletter (April-May 2011): 17-18
Daniel C. Remein, ‘Kinesis of Nothing and the Ousia of Poetry (Part Review Essay, Part Notes on a Poetics of Auto-Commentary’, on Wildfire, Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary 3 (2010): 67-94.
Scott Thurston, ‘Innovative Poetry in Britain Today’, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (April 2010): 15-30.
Marc Porée, ‘Contemporary British Women Poets (1985-2005): A New Legislature’, E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde Anglophone 6.1 (October 2008)
Thom Donovan, Introduction for Andrea Brady, Segue Reading Series, New York
Sophie Mayer, Review of Andrea Brady’s Wildfire and Simon Perrill’s Nitrate, Hand+Star
Richard Owens, ‘Working Notes: Andrea Brady’s Wildfire,’ Damn the Caesars
Jon Clay, Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze: Transformative Intensities (Continuum, 2010)
Amica Dall, ‘Trying to Look Correctly at the “Subjects” of Andrea Brady’s “Saw Fit”’, Hot Gun 1 (2008): 22-27.
Nicky Marsh, ‘Going “Glocal”: The Local and the Global in Recent Experimental Women's Poetry’, Contemporary Women's Writing 1 (2007): 192-202
Simon Perril, ‘Two Slices of Toast: Emptiness and Disappointment in Recent Works by Peter Manson and Andrea Brady’, Symbiosis 11.1 (April 2007): 75-88
Tom Jones, ‘Andrea Brady’s Elections’, Litteraria Pragensia (December 2007): 139-147
Josh Robinson, ‘“Abject Self on Patrol”: Immaterial Labour, Affect, and Subjectivity in Andrea Brady’s Cold Calling’, Litteraria Pragensia (December 2007): 148-157
John Wilkinson, ‘Off the Grid’, Chicago Review 53.1 (Spring 2007): 95-115, reprinted in The Lyric Touch (Salt, 2007)
Marianne Morris, ‘Behind the Veil’, Review of Embrace, Jacket 29 (April 2006)
Robin Purves, ‘American Change: A Note on Andrea Brady and the Language of Consumption’, Edinburgh Review 114 (2004): 177-185
Stuart Kelly, ‘All lines are busy’, Review of Cold Calling, Poetry Review 94.2 (2004): 95-7
John Hall, ‘Eluded readings: trying to tell stories about reading some recent poems’, The Gig 15 (Sept. 2003)
Reviews of Vacation of a Lifetime: Publishers Weekly 23/9/02; Keith Elliot, Terrible Work
Translations
Translated into Catalan by Jessica Pujol Duran, Llengües de foc: Antologia de poesia anglesa actual (Mallorca: Lleonard Muntaner, 2021)
Translated into Croatian, ‘Suvremeno britansko pjesnitstvo’, POEZIJA (Summer 2015): 31-3
Translated into Greek, a glimpse of 16 (2014)
Translated into Slovene, Slovak and Finnish, 11th annual The Golden Boat residency (2013)
Translated into German by Léonce W. Lupette, Christian Lux and Susanna Mewe for Schreibheft: Zeitschrift für Literatur 80 (Feb. 2013): 155-166
Translated into Spanish for La Isla Tuerta: 49 poetas britanicos (1946-2006) (Madrid: Lumeneditorial, 2009)
Translated into French for cipM 147 (Marseille, May 2006)
Anthologies
Wretched Strangers, ed. Ãgnes Lehõczky and J. T. Welsch (Norwich: Boiler House Press, 2018)
The World Speaking Back to Denise Riley, ed. Ãgnes Lehõczky and Zoë Skoulding (Norwich: Boiler House Press, 2018), 143-4
The Caught Habits of Language: An Entertainment for W.S. Graham for Him Having Reached One Hundred, ed. Rachael Boast, Andy Ching and Nathan Hamilton (Norwich: Boiler House Press, 2018), 142-3
women – poetry – migration: An Anthology, ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (Palmyra, NY: theenk books, 2017), 13-18
Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics, ed. James Byrne and Robert Sheppard (Todmorden: Arc, and Omskirk: Edge Hill University Press, 2017), 43-54
Out of Everywhere 2, ed. Emily Critchley (Hastings: Reality Street, 2015), 33-39
For the Children of Gaza, ed. Matthew Staunton and Rethabile Masilo (Oxford: Onslaught Press, 2014)
The Dark Would: anthology of language art, ed. Philip Davenport (Apple Pie Editions, 2013)
The Wolf: A Decade (Poems 2002-2012), ed. James Byrne (2012)
Infinite Difference, an anthology of women’s writing, ed. Carrie Etter (Shearsman, 2010), 148-157