100 Years

Along with his songs and prose, author and singer-songwriter Nathan Brown has written at least one poem every day for over 20 years now. And from that practice comes this new collection in which each poem deals chronologically with every year of our lives, from the ages of 0 to 100. In one, he tells the story of an 8-year-old girl attempting to cross the border into the U.S. with her older brother. Further in, he works through the mental gyrations of a 39-year-old man and a woman who is 61 falling in love at a reading in a bookstore. As a whole, these poems offer a stark sensitivity to all the stages, transitions, and graduations of life, while also marking a willingness to put an honest, sometimes even cold and hard, magnifying glass up to the struggles of the soul--the Venus and the Mars in us all.