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A collection of poetry about dislocation in an unexpectedly childless marriage. A time of wandering follows a period of exile and adjustment both within and without. The poems are both lyrical and colloquial with a fascination for invented forms that mirrors the altered circumstances of life.

“The precision and wit of Andrea Carter Brown’s language transform events that are almost aggressively mundane into exemplars of human enterprise.” —Marilyn Hacker

“The Disheveled Bed tells the heartbreaking story of a woman and a man in search of a child who discover themselves instead.”—Molly Peacock

TABLE OF CONTENTS
FROM THE BOOK

The birds are back. I like to think
the first two, singing in the pines

four years ago, five floors below,
mated, gave birth, migrated, and came
back with their young, who also bred,

and whose descendants, and theirs,
now pair up and nest, a new generation
every year we've lived here, one extended
and extending family for the one

denied us, the random yet orderly
rise and fall of their songs rising as high
as our high-rise home, as you brush

out my hair and we straighten
together the disheveled bed.

From "The Disheveled Bed"

Andrea Carter Brown was born in Paterson, N.J. She is the author of a chapbook, Brook & Rainbow, which won the 2000 Sow's Ear Press Competition, and her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Five Points, and the Mississippi Review, among other publications. Her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005 and has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Writer's Voice, Thin Air, River Oak Review, and The MacGruffin. She won the 2004 River Styx Poetry Prize for her sonnet crown "September 12." A longtime resident of New York City, she now lives in Los Angeles and is Managing Editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal at Pomona College.

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