My Debut Book of Poems Is Out Now

It's only $11 — thank you for reading and sharing with a friend.

Dear Friends:

Today’s the day. Forbearance has arrived. I won’t ramble on here because, frankly, I’d rather you get to enjoying it. My publisher has priced the book at $11, comically inexpensive for something that has exacted from me years of study, prayer, and pencils. It is so close to costing nothing at all that I will not bother concealing my true intentions: I want you to buy the book. Of course. I want you to buy the book so you can read the poems and the poems can affect you — effect in you some jolt or joy or momentary stay against confusion. Isn’t that why we read poetry? It is why I wrote this book. May it bless you.¹

With all gratitude,

Cameron

Now available from Cascade Books.

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Praise for Forbearance

In lines taut as a drum or the stakes of a tent of meeting, we meet in Brooks’ Forbearance a restraint that belies an urgent strength, poems training us for some contest or some kingdom here and sure to come—as sinewy and hale a debut as I’ve seen.

—Mischa Willett, author of The Elegy Beta and Phases

Cameron Brooks's debut book is about forbearance, but capably avoids falling into sepia-toned stoicism. Instead, Brooks's collection offers a delicate, keening sense of all that is beautiful, fleeting, as well as what endures without ever becoming maudlin. … Brooks is also a musician, and it shows. Even the titles of the poems sound like lyrics to a song, such as "The Cottonwoods Were Sowing Starry Seeds," and they are just as pleasurable to read.

—Eliza Blue, folk singer and author of Little Pasture on the Prairie

"'To savor the contingency of being' could be the mission statement of Cameron Brooks’s Forbearance, a gorgeously written evocation and meditation on life lived among the prairies, orchards, flooded farms, 'gaunt silo[s]' of South Dakota's High Plains. Brooks loves words and their glorious mouthfeels as much as he loves the world itself: 'the ooze of too-ripe apples/beneath boots,' 'the cicada’s tymbal cry.' In what he calls, with Stevensian grandeur, 'the verve/of fathomless particularities,/ becoming what they only could become,' Brooks savors, with bemused forbearance and stunned adoration, all the contingent and fleeing moments of 'the runaway chore of your life.'"

—Bruce Beasley, author of Prayershreds

When reading Cameron Brooks’ Forbearance, the heart of his work spoke to me from lines describing our relationship with life, with the changing seasons, with ourselves … He is acutely aware of nature and how we occasionally cohabitate with it, but never rule it. We must make peace with these realities. I enjoyed the time spent with this book.

—Bruce Roseland, Poet Laureate of South Dakota

Finally, a sample poem

Here’s one of the last poems I completed for the book. “D.B.M.” is about the generosity of strangers and other welcome surprises.

D.B.M.

Donor Breast Milk. You weren’t expecting that?
Makes two of us. Nor was I expecting
the routine buzz of a hand sanitizer dispenser
outside our stuffy N.I.C.U. room to verge
on the liturgical, those early, swollen hours,
signaling the arrival of another scrubbed angel
to see our adopted son through the night,
so we could sleep on the miniature pullout
behind the curtain in the corner, or try.
Did not expect the strip mall parking lot
rendezvous, pulling up beside some random
dude and his wife so she could unload her cooler
of frozen D.B.M. into the cooler in our trunk.
And now? Waking to sudden midnight cries
of a baby boy who looks nothing like me
or my wife, who looks nothing like me. I rise
to find his baby body free-falling in the bassinet,
hurtling through spacetime at 67,000 mph,
duly terrified. I rock him in the shadows
till he returns to a cocoon of amniotic dreams.
Morning next, after his bottle, we sprawl out
in daylight on the very solid living room rug,
studying the Other’s smile, exchanging it.

1. If you’d like a copy of the book but cannot for whatever reason afford it, please send me a direct message here on Substack. Also, if any of you live in Sioux Falls, I will deliver a book to you directly. Let me know.