The Blue Clerk

"Brand’s lines are unique and quite comfortable to get lost in." - Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

"The Blue Clerk is nothing less than a reckoning with the entirety of Brand’s poetic outlook and philosophy." - Steven W. Beattie, Quill & Quire

"It takes a truly gifted writer to not only write about the queer experience as identity, but to also skillfully and astutely motion to the entire concept of temporal universality. The Blue Clerk may be one of the best collections of prose poems I’ve read in a long while." - July Westhale, Lambda Literary Review

"An 'ars poetica' and instant modern classic. . . . The Blue Clerk is beautiful—physically beautiful—in the nakedness of its stitched blue spine. But the book is beautiful, most substantially, in its sumptuous and incendiary prose, in its fierce challenge to the illusions of literature, and in its manifest belief in the act of writing." - David Chariandy, The Walrus

"At times brilliant and also opaque, The Blue Clerk is a major achievement that challenges us to reflect on writing as an unsettled and unsettling form of engagement with experience and meaning. . . . Readers . . . will be rewarded if they occasionally pause, take time to reflect, and reread this rich and enriching book." - Jim Hannan, World Literature Today

"The Blue Clerk deserves praise for its originality, its willingness to push the prose poem into new and exciting configurations."
  - John Bradley, Rain Taxi

“The Blue Clerk has already been hailed as an ‘instant classic’ in the national media, and its premise carefully mapped. Brand tells the story of her unfolding consciousness, using key moments of her life to suggest the various shifts and epiphanies that inform each of her previous works—it is, indeed, her Ars Poetica, her attempt to articulate the underlying aesthetic philosophy of her oeuvre.” - Gregory Betts, Canadian Literature

“If you’ve been reading Brand for decades, The Blue Clerk is written for you, right down to its index. If you are a new reader of Brand, The Blue Clerk was also written for you: it’s a fascinating dialogue about the work of poetry that is wry, exacting, and alive with a finely-wrought hope.” - Tanis MacDonald, Arc Poetry Magazine

"Brand astonishes me and drives me to look up words such as 'brindle' and 'xylem.' Is it because she is a poet that she can revivify language like this, while moving so fluidly through histories, music, and philosophy? . . . The book unfolds in meditative fragments titled 'verso,' and I have come to believe that Brand can see through a written page to its hidden side."
  - Selby Wynn Schwartz, The Guardian