GOOD ACTORS
Good Actors is a side-eyed illumination of the artist as self-help guru, oracle, and sage, but more importantly as mother, lover, and friend.
Part psychological experiment, part conceptual art piece, part screenplay, Good Actors is 100% a joyful celebration of language and life. And because it is Sommer, the book is hilarious, melancholy, and existential.
Birds, LLC; 2024
Backup Singers
With BACKUP SINGERS Browning follows up her debut, Either Way I'm Celebrating, with an even rawer and starker, and again darkly humorous navigation of friendship, marriage, and motherhood. The result is a more overtly political assessment of the absurd deficit between what we're confronted with and what we're equipped with to deal with those confrontations: "It's a girl, / and the wires she needs // open her hands / before they're fists."
Browning combats this deficit with relentless anaphora and repetition, reducing seemingly impossible relationships to their most basic element--a love that begets an unconditional loyalty: "I'm here! I didn't run!"
Birds, LLC; 2014
Either Way I’m Celebrating
Whether a traditional lyric, a section-length love poem about cage fighting, or a collage of prose and fragments meditating on a haunted and haunting domestic architecture, the poems in Sommer Browning's Either Way I'm Celebrating share the same DNA base pairs of humor and sentiment, skepticism and humanism; the source of their integrity is how Browning combines and recombines them. Complemented throughout by her sardonic comics, this collection stubbornly celebrates, if only our own absurdity.
Birds, LLC; 2011
You’re On My Period
“If I were Donald Trump I’d try to become Sommer Browning,” writes Sommer Browning in You’re On My Period: Jokes & Charts, a collection of weird jokes, dirty revelations, and impeccably researched charts.
Counterpath, 2016
the circle book
Sommer Browning sees things we don’t see, even if they’re right in front of us. That’s what distinguishes the great thinkers of our time! They look at the stars and they ask, “How is that I can see?” They look at the color of a flower and say, “How is that this is red?” Sommer Browning looks at a circle and sees a urethra. She sees a “view of my head from a second story walk-up.” She sees the abyss. And a pizza. Her humor is so unpretentious, so unique—yet outrageously minimalistic, that it achieves a kind of scientific greatness.
The Circle Book shows how even the most basic shape—a circle—can be transcended by the power of language. What’s happening when we look at a circle and see the body of Christ? Something hilariously mystical. — Bianca Stone
Cunieform Press, 2012
Poet-Librarians in the Library of Babel
Poet-Librarians in the Library of Babel is a compendium of experimental essays, creative meditations, non-fiction accounts, and lyrical explorations that challenge, redefine, and/or widen perspectives on subjects related to libraries and librarianship. These subjects encompass abstractions such as silence, knowledge, questioning, solitude, information, access, truth, organization, preservation, alphabetical order, digitization, and memory to such concretenesses as bookshelves, archives, mildew, the Patriot Act, scholars, pencils, catalogs, and the list goes on.
Co-edited with Shannon Tharp.
Library Juice Press, 2018
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