The Way it Was

A. M. Brandt’s fine and restless first book of poems, The Way it Was, has a poem entitled, Ode to a View Through a Window with Fear of an Elegy Inside it. It encapsulates the particular urgency and timeliness of this book: we live in an unknowable and fearful era. These poems speak to our moment with a spirit that mixes ode and elegy so fully that it is neither possible nor desirable to tell them apart. What a gift this book is: a gift and a guide.Jim Moore, author of Underground, New and Selected Poems, Invisible Strings, Lightning at Dinner, and The Long Experience of Love

Brandt sees life’s everydayness and makes it vibrant. Here we are reminded that small miracles beckon us to slow the pace; we are invited to see what can be spotted through the windows of our waiting. These poems are solace.

Mary Doll, author of Beckett and Myth: An Archetypal Approach

The poems found here are profane and, therefore, apolitical. Many of them describe a life in which the narrator is identified by conventional strictures-feminist, modern, motherly, womanly, sexual, and lonely. The essence of the voice composes of all these things but poetically imagines not to be any of them.

Darren Morris, poet, and editor of Parhelion Literary Magazine