Randall Brown is the author of the award winning collection MAD TO LIVE, his essay on (very) short fiction appears in THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH FICTION, and he appears in BEST SMALL FICTIONS 2015, 2017, & 2019 and The Norton Anthologies FLASH FICTION: AMERICA, NEW MICRO: EXCEPTIONALLY SHORT FICTION & HINT FICITON; also, his essays appeared in Grey House's CRITICAL INSIGHTS: AMERICAN SHORT STORY & CRITICAL INSIGHTS: FLASH FICTION. He founded and directs FlashFiction.Net and has been published and anthologized widely, both online and in print. Recent book include the flash fiction collection THIS IS HOW HE LEARNED TO LOVE (Sonders Press 2019), the prose poetry collection I MIGHT NEVER LEARN (Finishing Line Press 2018) and the novella HOW LONG IS FOREVER (Running Wild Press 2018). He is also the founder and managing editor of Matter Press and its JOURNAL OF COMPRESSED CREATIVE ARTS. He received his MFA in Fiction from Vermont College.
Brown is extremely talented, and I enjoyed these prose poems/flash fictions very much. They range in topic and feel. Some are humorous, like "The Characters Deleted from Stories" (the title says it all). Some will break your heart, like "Chorus," which explores death. 4.5 stars.
Randall Browns’s beautiful poems, or rather, prose poems (as far as I can tell) display such emotional expressions, they involve you completely. An example would be these lines from Chose: “He concentrated all his attention on these things—the balls and the flies—and there is something to be said for such vast loneliness.” There are also intriguing ideas, like a poem dedicated to The Characters Deleted from Stories. It’s a pleasure to read it.