"So rivers the willow" in the May 2024 Water Issue of Kansas! Magazine

Lori Brack

Writer Editor Instructor

Books

A Case for the

Dead Letter Detective

Museum Made of Breath

Rooted: The Best New

Arboreal Nonfiction

A Fine Place to See the Sky

Works

Bio

Lori Brack is the author of A Case for the Dead Letter Detective, Kelsay Press 2021, and Museum Made of Breath, Spartan Press 2018. Her 2010 chapbook, A Fine Place to See the Sky, is a poetic script for a work of performance art by Ernesto Pujol. In 2017, her essay "Pineward"

was included in Rooted: Best New Arboreal Nonfiction published by Outpost 19 and edited by Josh MacIvor-Andersen.

Lori's work with artists in all genres, as well as serving in art centers and in colleges informs her public work in Kansas and beyond.

Click for full resume

Bio

Writing Ideas

Click Writing Exercises and Inspiration at the top for a writing prompt or an interesting writing link. These exercises were created at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020.

Reviews

& Blurbs

In her new book, A Case for the Dead Letter Detective, Brack’s magical language weaves a world in which utterance exists at the knife-edge of loss. There the sky is the shade of a “flimsy blue aerogramme,” and her detective becomes a frustrated master “of other peoples’ catalogs of desire.” With its kinetic, sometimes absurdist language and improbably wonderful throughline, A Case is a brilliant found letter, a tour de force.

Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here

In her gorgeous metaphor of the Dead Letter Detective, whose job is to show us “the hole in the side of your life” that “spits out things you didn’t know were there,” Lori Brack invites us to recover what we thought forever lost and to see what we’ve always overlooked. “The detective is summoned to divine the address,” she writes, and divine Brack does in these delicate, magical-realist-tinged, and mysterious poems that are simultaneously as clear as a creek over purifying stones.

Bruce Beasley, author of Theophobia

The title Museum Made of Breath is apropos of this work. Brack puts on display a range of ideas and emotions worthy of a traveling exhibition. You will wander these pages as you would a museum’s rooms, browsing, studying, taking in the range from extravagance to intimacy.

Roy Beckemeyer,
RIVER CITY POETRY

In The Press