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

Lori Brack

Writer    Editor    Instructor

Books

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A Case for the

Dead Letter Detective

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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.

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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

Links

Click on the links below to read a selection of my work published and archived online:

POEMS

"The Dead Letter Detective Finds a Clue," "The Dead Letter Detective Writes to His Lover," and "The Dead Letter Detective Grows Old" in Packingtown Review vol. 2 (on pages 1, 54, and 160 of the pdf)

"Delicious" in concis Winter 2015

"A Dose of Certain Things" in Unlost Journal of Found Poetry and Art issue 14

"Relics of a Tearaway World" in Gordon Square Review issue 3

"Instructions for What Comes Next" in Miracle Monocle issue 5

"Disinformation" in The CDC Poetry Project 2018

"Sky slips," "Not Yet Flying," and "At the Museum of Flowers" in Heartland!

"Ignite" in Rogue Agent issue 38

ESSAYS

"The Ground, Remembering" in Atlas and Alice, 2021

"A Blur in the Field" in Cutleaf, 2022

PROJECT

"here-ing" by Janine Antoni, poem selection and instructions - scroll down for photos and recordings 

 

ARTS JOURNALISM

"Off-Broadway, a Kansas playwright meditates on the labor that defines us" in The Shout

"Often protested in Kansas and across the U.S., 'All Boys Aren't Blue' has much to share" in the Kansas Reflector

"Lincoln Art Center has encouraged a vibrant, exploratory community for 30 years" in the Kansas Reflector

"This new museum shines spotlight on rediscovered Kansas artist Clara Hatton" in the Kansas Reflector

"New Lindsborg gallery and arts education center opens with Mike Hartung’s provocative paintings" in the Kansas Reflector 

"On facing difference and identify in Tallgrass Film Festival documentary screenings" in The Pitch KC

VIDEOS

Reading April 2021 in the Salina Arts & Humanities Spring Poetry Series

Workshops: Virus Poems - 3 writing lessons in the Salina Arts & Humanities Arts Infusion Program:

Plant virus    Language virus   Blackout virus

News and Events

Contact

Email: lori.brack@gmail.com

Postal: PO Box 153 Lucas KS 67648

Available for writing workshops, book discussions, and other creative presentations.

Need a sharp editing eye and writing help?

 

Please email. I'd love to hear your ideas.

Contact
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