Press & Reviews
“Brownlee’s Llano is a place complex and haunting in ways you may not expect. And once you’ve been there [as his reader], there’s a good chance that, like him, you’ll never be far from it.”
-Robert Faires in The Austin Chronicle
J. Scott Brownlee’s first full-length poetry collection explores the landscapes, people, and religiosity of his hometown of Llano, Texas and the surrounding Texas Hill Country. Requiem for Used Ignition Cap won the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize and Texas Institute of Letters award for the Best First Book of Poetry by a Texas author in 2016. It was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Writers’ League of Texas Book Award.
Read full reviews of the collection in:
What critics are saying about Requiem for Used Ignition Cap:
“Brownlee’s poems are deeply rooted in Hill Country soil, with evocations of caliche, live oaks and cedars, Indian blankets and bull nettles, mockingbirds and rattlesnakes, whitetail deer and yellow perch, and the vast, unknowable blue of the Central Texas sky.
Here, too, are the people who live among those natural wonders, and the trucks they drive and the guns they shoot and the Bibles they thump and the meth they get high on. And nothing of the place that is conjured—not the antlered buck or the wounded Iraq war vet, not the salt lick or the horseflies or the catfish heads on a clothesline—has an air of distance about it, of being drawn from memories of long ago. The descriptions vibrate with the immediacy of things freshly seen and felt, held just under the skin and still rushing hot through the blood. . . .
The Hill Country of Brownlee's poems is a land of stark beauty and startling violence, intertwined like climbing vines and every bit as natural, a place where "the river splits light like a straight razor's edge," where a yearling fawn hit by a truck and dead on the road is still "bright in the eye-like headlights of traffic," where even the beloved bluebonnets warn us not to plant them in the grass "because we kill every good thing we touch." Brownlee's Llano is a place complex and haunting in ways you may not expect. And once you've been there, there's a good chance that, like its author, you'll never be far from it.”
— Robert Faires in The Austin Chronicle
“Requiem for Used Ignition Cap provides an important look at how faith plays out in the small towns of central Texas—how it permeates everything. Again and again, this book [emphasizes] the importance of trying to understand a place, of trying to fully articulate all the intricate details of whatever it is ‘home’ really means.”
— Justin Carter in Heavy Feather Review
“Brownlee teaches us about home. And it is clear for this author that, even amidst the deluge of disappearance, Llano holds immense value, and that every resident—suicidal veterans, deer along the highway, catfish heads on a clothesline, and flowers that blossom in roadside ditches—is a teacher. Dusty as this Texan town may be, its soil is still rich with lessons.”
— Brandon Jordan Brown in Whale Road Review
“Brownlee investigates the breach between the male role he was raised to assume and the man—tender, searching, empathetic—he’s become. These poems often speak through or accompany the men of Llano as they engage in traditional rituals of manhood. They’re former soldiers . . . hunters who eat what they kill
. . . laborers whose work shapes their bodies.
A collective “we” recurs throughout the book, but Brownlee only sometimes uses it to speak from the perspective of men; other times he speaks in the voices of wildflowers that bloom in the town’s ditches, suggesting he may identify as much with the local flora as with the townspeople.
Perhaps what I admire most about this collection is that although his isolation and bewilderment are palpable, Brownlee declines to focus solely on his own pain . . . endeavoring to understand the impact of Llano’s landscape and culture not just on his own life but on the lives of those who have stayed there.
This book is a love song—to the people of Llano, yes, but most simply and beautifully to its fields and trees, its birds and flowers, its white-tailed deer. Brownlee deliberately seeks to re-inhabit his home, and despite discomfort and alienation, finds empathy for a community that may ultimately not include him.”
— Melissa Crowe in Beloit Poetry Journal
“Brownlee writes vividly about his hometown and deeply etches certain moments in a reader’s memory. Llano is a place where men and boys love guns, hunt for deer, fish for catfish, swim, get drunk, go to Baptist revivals, shoot pool, play football, score drugs, and where “poor Tejanos / jump in old Ford trucks, waiting to melt // thick pools of asphalt for new roads.”
— Peter Makuck in North Carolina Literary Review
“Brownlee builds a doxology from shotgun shells, wildflowers, and catfish. The dominant mode of the collection is elegiac and the poet combines the devotional impulse with a lovingly drawn portrait of his hometown of Llano, Texas. This collection also provides a nuanced portrait of lower middle class white people, the same population Claudia Rankine discussed in her keynote address at AWP 2016. I could talk about this amazing collection for hours.”
— Dante Di Stefano on The Best American Poetry Blog
“Brownlee’s topophilia traces the typography of Texas, but also of the heart—heart as an emotional abstraction and heart as a muscle that will eventually give out. . . . The collection is a narrative deeply rooted in the Texas landscape where wildflowers thrive. . . . Just as Emily Dickinson’s church dome was an orchard, Brownlee believes that neither he, nor the mockingbird [in an oak tree above him] ‘needs a hymnal to take turns singing.’ These poems are Brownlee’s testament to his worship of the natural world.”
— Hannah Bonner in Asheville Poetry Review
“Requiem for Used Ignition Cap is infused by Texas landscape, with its vast sun-bleached horizon—stark but filled with natural beauty. The poems paint a picture of small town working class life intermixed with violence and religion. The reader is soon taken into a world that is both very American, and yet very distinct—Texas being a country unto itself. There’s both a lyricism along with a great spirit of erasure at work in these poems that make this book a singular read. A lament that pulls in a lot of local history, along with its own particular embodiment of grief and loss, it strikes me as the work of a masterful poet of place.”