Cover Art & Design: Daniel Obzejta, Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 32 pages, 3” X 5”
June 2016, ISBN 978-1-936919-38-3
About Brandon Courtney
Brandon Courtney is a veteran of the United States Navy, and the author of The Grief Muscles (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2014) and Rooms for Rent in the Burning City (Spark Wheel Press, 2015), as well as the chapbook, Inadequate Grave (YesYes Books, 2016), which won the 2017 Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award. His most recent full-length collection, This, Sisyphus, was released with YesYes in Spring 2019. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Colgate University, Juniper Summer Writers’ Institute, and Seaside Writers’ Conference. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Tin House, Boston Review, Guernica, Memorious, The Progressive, and American Literary Review.
Inadequate Grave by Brandon Courtney
About Inadequate Grave
Brandon Courtney’s Inadequate Grave spins together like slits on a zoetrope, animating a single, tragic moment: the drowning of a best friend in the Arabian gulf during the Iraq War. Mulling over that moment the way only a mind under grief’s sway can, Inadequate Grave is elegy-in-action. And in the tradition of great nautical writing, Courtney, regardless of how angry or devastated, never evades the sea’s truly sublime power: “nothing/has changed: the water that drowns is still more/beautiful than the lungs it/enters.” Inadequate Grave is both a farewell letter to the dead and a love letter to what killed him.
—William Brewer
Interviews
Interview with Veterans Writers at Consequences Magazine
Interview at 30 North
Winner of the 2017 Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award!
*Inadequate Grave is the inaugural title in the new Companion series of chapbooks from YesYes Books. At the heart of the Companion Series is the acknowledgement that books are sometimes all that connects us to and keeps us in this world.
Daniel Obzejta creates the cover art for this series. Interior design is by Alban Fischer. The series is printed and bound by Scout Books in Portland, OR.
