Learned

Set in the 90s, alternating between the storied quads of Oxford University and the dank recesses of London pubs given over to public displays of queer BDSM, Learned chronicles poet and Rhodes Scholar Carellin Brooks’ extreme explorations of mind and body. In these poems, the speaker trembles on the verge of discovery, pushing her physical limits through practices of pain, permission, and pleasure. But her inability to negotiate the unspoken elite codes of Oxford begs the question: how to unlearn a legacy of family dissolution and abuse? Bold, nuanced, and ultimately triumphant Learned chronicles an intimate education in flesh, desire, and bodily memory.

AUTHOR

Carellin Brooks

CARELLIN BROOKS is the author of the poetry collection, Learned, and One Hundred Days of Rain, which won the 2016 ReLit Award for Fiction and the 2016 Edmund White Award for Debut LGBT+ Fiction, and was published in French by Les Allusifs. She is also the author of Fresh Hell, Every Inch a Woman, and Wreck Beach. Brooks lives in Vancouver and is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia.

Reviews

“Unabashed, funny, inventive, touching and self-questioning, the poems delight as a paean to the unique glory of brash, dumbfounding youth.” —Vancouver Sun

“These poems are snapshots of a student changing dress for gown as she earns respect in a world for whom children and women have little currency apart from honours attached to the lucky who seize the box and lift themselves out of invisibility.” —The British Columbia Review

“Carellin Brooks traces her bumpy path to coming of age, intellectually and sexually, in this provocative, sharply observed and often funny debut collection.” —The Toronto Star