Allen Braden

Allen Braden Poems

In order to develop something akin to miracle,
he acquired a taste for the peeling billboards
that used to promise sweetness to every man
...

Everything necessary to maintain
every foundation ever built so far
is found simply by fondling the latch,
...

For her it all began on the streets of San Francisco
where The White Angel was doling out slabs of bread,
mugs of coffee and pearl barley stew. Each man's
...

Unless beauty's a nest of mice staking claim
to upholstery abandoned, the anonymous
tuft snagged on barbed wire or a tom named
...

Not far from where a coyote led me
over the sparsely timbered hillside,
I found a feather held in the sagebrush
...

Proud and skinny tow-head
stretching for sunshine,
slender arrow of gold
...

In his bleary memory she poses
like an immaculate mannequin,
her eyes pimentos, joints frozen
...

Maybe I shouldn't even attempt this,
remaking a made thing as others have.
It was a day you would have pronounced
...

Magic stairs, you said, new to language then. Steps appear
and disappear. Because you are now thirteen, I wait
for you to vanish. What I mean: for some teenager
...

If a magpie alights on a snowdrift, is it only
half a bird? The answer the difference between
night/day. Bonus: a silhouette of said magpie
...

So what if trains jostle our apples down?
If light that ripens each turns every brown?
The solution waits in unfallowed pasture
...

Allen Braden Biography

Allen Braden is an American poet. Braden graduated from McNeese State University, with an MFA. His work is published in The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and Georgia Review. He was poet-in-residence for the Poetry Center and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He teaches at Tacoma Community College.)

The Best Poem Of Allen Braden

Walker Evans

In order to develop something akin to miracle,
he acquired a taste for the peeling billboards
that used to promise sweetness to every man
on the day and night crews at Chicago Steel.

He had an eye for the architecture of failure:
the straw broom at an angle in the immaculate
corner of a dirt-floored, single-room shack
housing a sharecropper and his family,

in front of which, at first light one day,
Evans caught four generations of reticence.
He praised the perfection in the ordinary,
in "famous men" with barefoot children

lining the edge of a tilled field outside Decatur
or in black Chryslers along an endless avenue.
From the alignment of light with shadow,
he chiseled away a new and affluent language

hidden in the columns at Belle Grove Plantation.
He spoke of how the past can shape the future
and negotiated, for us, the cracks in Alabama clay
like the Pangaea breaking into singular worlds.

Allen Braden Comments

Allen Braden Popularity

Allen Braden Popularity

Close
Error Success