If Beauty Has to Hide
Spuyten Duyvil, 2018 (cross-genre)
A reckoning with one's body and its shit. The intersection between Japanese pop music and Richard Linklater's film Waking Life. A young couple flitting between love hotels in the bowels of Tokyo. This trio of loosely connected pieces set Japan in the periphery of their hazy gaze.
"As someone who has long been fascinated by space and line-break in prose, I greatly admire the remarkable music and architecture of these compositions. Beautiful and vivid, there are scenes in this book that I will never forget. Brennan is an exciting and important new writer."
—Dan Chaon, author of ILL WILL
Murder Ballads: Exhuming the Body Buried Beneath Worthsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Punctum Books, 2016 (creative literary criticism)
In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were engaged in a top secret experiment. This was not, as many assume, the creation of a book of poetry. A book emerged, to be sure—the landmark Lyrical Ballads. But the two poets were in fact pursuing far different ends than simply making poems: they sought to birth from their work a singular, idealized Poet.
Blending critical examination with jocular playlets-in-verse featuring the authors of the two books in baffled conversation, Murder Ballads reopens a 200-year-old cold case that never received a proper investigation: Who was the first true Author of Lyrical Ballads, and how exactly did he die?
