Lori Brack

A Case for the Dead Letter Detective Lori Brack

In her gorgeous metaphor of the Dead Letter Detective, whose job is to show us "the hole in the side of your life" that "spits out things you didn't know were there," Lori Brack invites us to recover what we thought forever lost and to see what we've always overlooked. "The detective is summoned to divine the address," she writes, and divine Brack does in these delicate, magical-realist-tinged, and mysterious poems that are simultaneously as clear as a creek over purifying stones. Brack envisions a world bursting with urgent messages we haven't yet learned how to find. She gathers these marvelous lost messages, presses them urgently into our hands, and tells us: here is what you've been missing. READ.

- Bruce Beasley, author of Theophobia, All Soul Parts Returned , and other books

Dear Reader, Brack's postage-stamp pieces of prose rupture reality, separating it like fingertips carefully tearing apart an old lick-and-stick sheet of stamps along the perforation lines. In the newly opened spaces in between the tidily torn edges, one's imagination can dance and breathe a bit of fresh air. Each poem is a human heart-with a pulse, par avion-lifting off the page ever so slightly into a realm that is wonderfully impossible. We can float there for a moment, then settle back down to earth with the residual flavor of postage stamp adhesive on our tongues.

- Lea Redmond, proprietor of The World's Smallest Post Service and author of Letters to My Future Self, Knit the Sky , and other books

"How much," wonders Lori Brack's dead letter detective, "can go amiss with twenty-six letters and ten digits?" In her new book, A Case for the Dead Letter Detective , Brack's magical language weaves a world in which utterance exists at the knife-edge of loss. There the sky is the shade of a "flimsy blue aerogramme," and her detective becomes a frustrated master "of other peoples' catalogs of desire." With its kinetic, sometimes absurdist language and improbably wonderful throughline, The Case is a brilliant found letter, a tour de force.

- Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here , and other books