Paperback:  128 pages
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-0-9821660-3-1
Publication Date: June 2009

Joseph Brown’s poems capture the delicate and subtle nuances of everyday life with precision, grace, and wisdom.  Brown’s poetic voice gives new life to familiar scenes of joy, faith, doubt, and loss.  Brown invites us into the lives of people we all know and makes them interesting and provocative and new.  Brown’s various speakers come alive in delightful lines that spark new thoughts and reflections about daily life, family, and community.  The Sun Whispers poems are fluid and bold interpretations of Brown’s world—these poems will make anyone laugh, think, and reflect in ways they never have before.

— Chris Freeburg, Assistant Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

As the author of Accidental Grace (1986), Brown, aka Luke, was sighted once before in that compelling debut. The Sun Whispers, Wait reintroduces Brown in a fine, classical layout, brought to us by Frank Chipasula and Brown Turtle Press, that perfectly matches Brown’s careful craftsmanship. This substantial collection of mostly new, some previously seen, lyrics greets the reader with the delicate voices of ancestors, living and dead: aging mothers, granddaddies and such—folks whose voices chiefly reach kindred souls held up by a world unseen. From the quite patience overheard in the voices Brown brings us in the opening section of the book, through the lighter, but no less observant pieces of the middle sections, we recognize in Brown a descendant of Jean Toomer…With the cosmopolitan air of pieces like “When the Eagle Flies: St Louis,” together with his Civil Rights elegies, the sensibility of the Midwestern poet is clearly evoked as Brown walks in and beside the path of Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks.

— Gordon Thompson, Associate Professor of English, City College of the City University of New York