from “The Tetrahedral Kites” [Read entire poem in DIAGRAM 21.4]
I. Alexander Graham Bell & the Preoccupation
By noon, the winds fail. The lull
will mean experiments like this
will have to wait. We'll have our tea
and talk of nothing, just to pass
the time. I'll say, I know exactly
what you mean. But I am here
and not here too. I see outside
a shape that's missing from the air
that is my shape, or my misuse
of sight, since nothing like a world
appears. There's just a kite. I mean
for me, there's nothing as controlled
or real. Dreams, you say. Yes, and strong.
You think I'm lost. You are not wrong.
More online samples: “Brother” [Cortland Review] / “Demolition” [Terrain.org] / “Real Estate” [Unsplendid]
Full Length & Limited Editions
Scrap Bones (2023)
From the back cover:
Attention and anticlimax, “opulent/ desolations of/ the filing cabinet,” wisdom and photography, “a plain Wheat Thin” against “a million ghosts,” and getting up and getting by: these poems get where they go through an enticing mixture of verbal care and common sense, a handle on anxiety that’s always in danger of going too far, like an angel straining to pick up a fish, or Michael Longley meeting W. C. Williams in a Louisiana wood (and telling him sonnets and tetrameters are, too, very American: these rule). There are worlds in between those worlds, and Collier Brown has seen them, along with their dragonfly-strewn, gently rhymed lake, and the anxiety lizard– no, really, read “The Escape,” read it now!– that may live in you too. “Are you okay? Are you/ okay?” the poet asks his beloved, and the gesture feels more than okay: it feels needed, and balanced, and lovely and full of heart. “Who’s the story for?” It’s for you, lucky reader. It’s waiting for you.
—Stephanie Burt, author of After Callimachus
Adger (2022)
Adger Cowans is an artist with an elated interior, and it was a stroke of luck for me that Cowans and Steve Albahari recorded a series of interviews in which that elation broke free of the conversation. Phrases like “the ethers,” “all that dancing,” “possessed,” “makes visible,” “shooting stars,” and “imbue my spirit” took on a meaning all their own, detached and intriguingly cohesive. This poetic improvisation—this jazz—makes Cowans’ art what it is.
That’s why I decided to translate those interviews into erasure poems for this book. Erasure poems are about discovery and reclamation. They sift the grit of everyday life for gems overlooked. That’s what Cowans’ photography does. —Collier Brown, Editor & Poet (Click here for more info.)
Eye, Thus Far, Unplucked (2017)
Boondoggle
In the glee roulade of loud tree frogs, the swat of hot rain running puddles up the sun, June bugs crack the catafalque of dusk, crickets cast black reticules. What was fishing line and orange cork dangles from the dead tree limbs—lanyards of a missed intent, many of them mine, except once made they catch blue glass, bottle caps, bright tin, beginning gifts for no good reason.
La Langue Verte (2016)
Beth Moon / Photographs
and S. Collier Brown / Poem
Editor: Alexander Scholz
Book with 20 original
photographs (pigment prints)
Limited to 300 signed
and numbered copies.
La Langue Verte (Edition Galerie Vevais, 2016) 
To the Wheatlight of June (21st Editions, 2013)
To the Wheatlight of June (2013)
Photographs by Ben Nixon
Poems by S. Collier Brown
Introduction by John Wood
Edition: 50 sets
10 silver gelatin photographs 16 x 20 inches
13 x 10 inch letterpress 10 platinum prints
Handcrafted in New England
Moth and Bonelight (2010)
Photographs by Jerry Uelsmann
Poems by S. Collier Brown
Introduction by John Wood
Handcrafted in New England
The Silver Edition: 20 numbered and 5 lettered copies
10 removable 20 x 16 inch signed silver gelatin prints
24 x 20 inch aluminum binding by Daniel Kelm
The Platinum Edition: 55 numbered and 15 lettered copies
10 tipped-in platinum prints, roughly 12 x 9 inches mounted to 18 x 14 inches
S. Collier Brown 