Closer Baby Closer by Savannah Brown

Closer Baby Closer Reviews

• 
  persephone ☾

  tucking safely my silly and overly dramatic notes app poetry away after reading "Poet (derogatory)"
  
• 
  Jacob

  Got called a hoe for carrying this in public
• 
  el

  chronically online and obsessed with the self, in a late-to-the-viral-joke, sometimes corny, often breathtakingly gorgeous way. that obsession with the self frequently lands the reader in a place so embarrassingly vulnerable (and embarrassed to be vulnerable), it feels like magic. much of this poetry is alert to its own corniness, which makes it incredibly fun, and technicolor, and tender. 3.4/5—a linguistic hoot, even if a few larger moments in the book struggled to keep pace or click into place:
  
  

  look! there’s a plane carving chemtrails in the night and they say / IN PURSUIT OF EXTREME MODERNITY / YOU HAVE BECOME INSUFFERABLE / CONGRATULATIONS YOU ARE SO DRUNK / AND SO CONTEMPORARY AND WITHOUT A CLUE / OH YOU DO LOVE THEM YOU DO JUST NOT / IN THE WAY THAT LETS BOTH OF YOU LIVE.
• 
  deniz eilmore

  i am a poet (derogatory)
• 
  Malwina

  So so sexy and so so agonizing and so so chronically online and so so so so lover girl
  
  
  My new favourite book, oh god, oh god, if you find yourself within a 2m radius of me prepare to hear about it (and which poems I think you would relate to).
  
  This is all so real and so human and I hate pain sm but if because of it I can understand pretty words and oxymorons and similes... it's bearable.
  
  Much much more accessible language than in Sweetdark!! Lower quantity of super obscure words, but higher quality I think? Every word that I did not know and had to google ended up giving the poem a new perspective that I wouldn't have thought of.
  
  I did a lot more literary analysis here than in Sweetdark too, probably because I am able to relate to things from this one more. Might be because I'm older now too, idk, will have to revisit Sweetdark...
  
  Highly recommend if you want to read about paradoxes, physical affection, (im)mortality, party girls, secrets, universe, women, women, women, yearning and deepest desires.
  
  Idk, I just felt understood and honestly that's all I want from a book of poetry.
  
  
  
  (ALSO, ESCAPRIL IS COMING!!!! AND BY GOD, WILL I ESCAPE!!!!!!!)
• 
  Jacob Black

  "Poet (derogatory)", "New year's, overstimulation" and "Sorry" go unreasonably hard
• 
  eve

  exquisite as always
• 
  Bash Harry

  existential, feminist, bimbo darling (positive)
• 
  aimilina

  as always, i'm in love with brown's poetry. gulped this down in two days. insane. makes me think of if "wasteland baby" and the feeling you get when you're drunk and confused and you abruptly realise you don't belong in this house party, had a baby. the emotions of this book are that baby.
  anyway enjoy it! solid 5 stars
• 
  Dan

  This book kicked my ass!!
• 
  Hannah

  Under the nail
  skin unravels like a[n]
  orange peel

  
  
  closer baby closer is the third poetry collection and fifth book by savannah brown. though i have not read her novels, i have read
  Sweetdark and quite enjoyed it!
  
  closer baby closer is the middle ground between short, sweet instagram styled poetry and traditional verse. brown covers digital topics, the internet, jeff bezos' sexts which is what makes instagram/social media style poetry come to mind.
  
  i am sad that I don't have favourite poems, and even sadder that I am not obsessed with this. I do have favourite descriptions! (if I did have a fav poem it would be My God, girlhood ripened) Here are the ones that caught my eye:
  
  

  plushy leg fat straining against a grater of fishnet (p. 15)

  
  

  obsession grants me the precision
  of a surgeon... (p. 19)

  
  
  3/5
• 
  livvy

  poet (derogatory) did something to me
• 
  Zak

  Life happens! And if life is a woman, I'd call it Savannah.
• 
  Mariel

  Before sinking my teeth into Closer Baby Closer, I wasn't that big into poetry but I'm glad to say that that now has changed. Better late than never I suppose.
  
  I first stumbled upon Brown's work through a recommendation. It was her debut novel, "The Truth About Keeping Secrets". Reading it I thought it was actually pretty good. Not necessarily groundbreaking but still beautifully written, with some overall interesting ideas. So, seeing this collection come out, I thought I’d give it a try since I was curious to see what Brown had to offer in a different mode of writing and boy oh boy was I in for a ride. I think that not having to deal with factors such as story and characters (in my opinion the weaker aspects of Ttaks) helped immensely. She was able to focus more on fleshing out her ideas/thoughts and experimenting with the form, both of which I loved. It told a cohesive overarching story, much like Ttaks, but in a more abstract and compelling way.
  
  The poems were simultaneously raw and nuanced, depicting vividly our inner conflicts and deepest insecurities. Hell, even its cover makes me want to gush about it: the [Creepy] newborn,maybe as in our desperate attempts at getting closer to each other in a way that may very well be futile- taking this timeless concept and throwing it into our contemporary world through the textlike form of the title. Also, very dreamlike in its images- especially how one flows to the next. Enigmatic yet revealing at the same time.
  
  5 favourites at the time of writing: Unmute me Unmute me Unmute me!!!, Sorry, Sudden fall long stop, The day of flying ants, Call and response.
  
  Really looking forward to reading more of her work in the future :)
• 
  Becca Jade

  I discovered Savannah when I was 14 and it has been a pleasure to grow up alongside her growth as a writer. I devoured this collection in one sitting and was struck by her ability to be experimental with her writing while also keeping her own artistic voice.
  
  This collection covers existentialism, love and the loss of it, self deprecation but equal parts empathy for the self, examinations and comments on growing up online. It was filled with wit, warmth, longing and heartache.
  
  It's hard to choose but I think my top 5 are 'Poet (derogatory)', 'New years, overstimulation', 'Sorry', 'Current events' and 'Everything is very complicated'.
  
  P.S. the poem comprised of Jeff Bezos' sexts is alarmingly good.
• 
  jen

  My baby my baby / I will know you well enough / to find you again / in the place where none of this is.
  
  there is the actual teenage glee of checking your shitty graduate school apartment mail system in the knowing that any one of these days the poet you youtubed all of highschool and sporadically look up every now and then is also sporadically making Very Good new things and one of those new things is a chapbook you preordered many months ago that could be in the mailbox in its orange colored pencil signed glory and that today is probably that day
  
  over too soon and lovely in all my chronically 23 year old swooning. lifelong voice. so soft that they r poet friends w rhiannon,, at one point we look up and all the love in our life touches. we are all touching!!!! mWAH
  
  Poet (derogatory):
  Anyway, we know the words always win. I'm sorry, another lie. Sometimes they win but often they lose. This is the truth: I have nothing else.
• 
  brooke echternacht

  started & finished in the same night- amazing sign. ofc i’ll have to revisit and read more closely, but as an avid brown fan, this was so exciting to read. her poetry has changed a lot over the years, and this was a wonderful and eccentric collection about love, loss, and late stage capitalism. i also preordered so i got a signed copy- hate to brag ;)))))
• 
  eris

  a chronically online collection that is simultaneously aloof/corny & self-aware of it. while there are certainly poems that don’t flow incredibly well and moments when the corniness overwhelms the intended vulnerability, this is a stunning, stunning collection.
• 
  Kennedy Marie

  ✨ she did it again ✨
• 
  salem paige

  intimate yet distant. digital yet visceral. closer baby closer is a clever exploration of love and 'cultural rancidness' through both traditional and contemporary form
• 
  Natassa

  "Poet (derogatory)" and yet I paused this to write a poem, what have you done, Sav
• 
  Sophia Carstairs

  The way I always feel understood and seen through Savannah Brown's poems is beautiful.
• 
  Zara

  So many lines highlighted and poems read multiple times before I even finished the whole collection
  
  This is the decision, to know
  you and keep knowing - our forms
  framed in the yellow second story window
  like displaced moons who've found
  The other in the same foreign orbit,
  who meet + continue to meet
  even after all the easy words are gone
• 
  Emma

  adoro!
• 
  sophie almond

  savannahs poetry has been with me from thirteen through to present day nineteen and god i am so eternally grateful. grateful to find someone who makes it feel like they’ve put my brain on paper in poetry form.
  
  much much love
• 
  Dina H.

  🫶🏼✨
  
  
  
  
  
  Pain theory
  
  
  The story of the masochist's daughter only ever had one ending. Under the nail skin unravels like a secret orange peel. A blood blister yawns awake on her trigger finger.
  She learns to lucid dream so she can die and not die. She is not afraid of knives or bad news. Not the plane crash. Not putrid water fear-chopped through the throat.
  Pain is the answer to a question her life is gathering the words to ask.
  The punchline is that when she grows up she becomes a lover, an acrobat who each perverted sunrise jumps from an unsurvivable height certain she can talk some sense into the fall.
  There's a line between pain and pleasure as much as there's a line between two eternities and anyway, this could be worse. The air is giving you one billion breathless kisses, lover. The ground wants you.
  
  
  
  
  New year's, overstimulation
  
  
  each time Juliet dies her lips
  are warm and blue with juice that precious little bitch. could she have wanted harder / I'm told my questions ruin otherwise pleasant
  afternoons / anyway, wounds. the one in the car park that still flexes as if swallowing. one in the backyard, nightflayed. when I'm upset the sun becomes a scab and was always a scab. another in the alley that gagged on the past and kept gagging. possession can mean that something is yours or that something is living inside you. cherry wound wants to be filled, apologizes for its glint. each bad day's a reverse conch shell, they're sucking the sound of the sea out of me, a worm with my face rolls around on the bed sheet, says if I wasn't put on the planet to worry, then God, look at all this wasted time.
  
  
  
  Olbers' paradox
  Instead of the moth-nibbled tarp that flaps soundly now above us, instead of all this faint topography and solar grit, the astronomers say
  the sky should bare a superdense sheet of stars, to hell with constellations, the night watched only by one devastatingly bright eye.
  Let it be known I'm glad it's not true.
  It would be too much and too beautiful. Nothing would get done. We would overextend our necks and spend all the dark hours weeping. It would be like
  a mass synchronous cellular orgasm or a mid-autumn so golden it entered the blood or a day where nobody died
  or those mornings when I wake up before vou to the static of early rain and your face is so wantless and still
  and mine and you're not even being a person and you're perfect still perfect and I have to turn away because I can't
  bear to look because there's something there writhing in you that if considered for more than a pulse would open me up it would open me up then undo me
  
  
  
  
  
  Current events
  I'm not saying I'd never get bloody.
  I would. For money, or respect, or for a dwindling population of bumblebees and their yellow socks, but I'm no soldier for love.
  You can't expect the flayed to go out and continue flaying-like, ask the slug to meet you on the other end
  of the salt mine and you get no more slug.
  I need the bundle
  of it shoved into my hands at the entrance of the station like the paper, one where every headline is I want you.
  Letter to the editor: do you think it'll always feel this good? and the editor says oh god yes.
  An anti-muse. Stop making. Take me in. Want me how a sentence wants an end, how a memory wants to be spoken. With the urgency of breath when the bag is finally removed from the head.
  
  
  
• 
  Kent

  Big news: Desire is toxic! Desire takes different forms with different people. Desire is definitely a body thing, and writing poems is theoretically a body thing. Or in its most ambitious form, mimesis, stresses the “my” sound at the beginning, so the poem is MY feelings in MY language so you feel how important MY life is in a poem. And it is important for the poems in Closer Baby Closer. Especially if you view the poems using a hot girl culture lens. Like women who go to clubs dressed fancy, or hot-fancy. I don’t even know the language to use here. But reading the poems, I feel like I can see the hot woman, and I can feel what the hot woman feels when people are looking at her, and she knows she’s being looked at. So the poem is about desire and it’s about being desired. And I understand desire is toxic. But so are so many other emotions I like feeling.
  
  Brown’s book reminds me a lot of Monica McClure’s Tender Data
  Tender Data. A book I loved for its treatment of hot girl culture. Those poems made me feel like I was living in that Beck song, “Get Real Paid.” All that stickiness and older male desire and drug culture. McClure really strung that voice out, and it was fascinating. And absolutely present. Brown isn’t so much about inhabiting the scene as she is accounting for the many facets of desire. The moment of desire. That sharp sensation. How the desire revolving around the hot girl has its own mythos, but that’s not the only desire being performed. Or, more significnatly, there are feelings or emotions that people might mistake for desire, like the dark feelings in dreams, but if they’re desire, what’s being desired? Put more succinctly, why do people want to make everything about desire?
  
  And that, to me, is the larger questions these poems pose. Desire is such a monstrous subject. Because it makes people feel like monsters. And Brown has a special view into that monster psychology via hot girl culture. The sharp sensation and then commentary on that sharp sensation.
• 
  Max Bergmann

  I'm usually not big on poetry but I'm starting to warm up to it, in part because of this collection. It is replete with vivid, punchy, and at times grotesque imagery that is just stellar. The intimacy of many of these poems can at times creep up to the edge of being a bit "cringe" but personally I tried to set aside this instinct and instead revel in the emotions presented. In doing so was taken on a fun ride through the confusing highs and lows of modern love.