1999
ISBN 1-880713-12-8
$ 12

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Laynie Browne's The Agency of Wind also contains verse as well as prose, but its deployment of the prose poem is too unique to avoid mention here. With an overarching tale of a girl on hallucinatorily interesting travels, Browne's prose at times recalls Lewis Carroll's:

I sat on a rose couch and drank rosebud tea. At first I said I wanted to sit on the rose couch, but then it was suggested to me that there was more than one rose couch. We asked the waiter to dry one off and pull out it's thorns so that we could sit more comfortably.

More often, the surrealism is distinctly latter day: "I am told, you must construct the future of mandolins." But it is Browne's subtle negotiation of the line and the sentence that are most noteworthy here. Her techniques are varied: regular paragraph/stanzas; more archly presented blocks of justified poetry/prose; and--most often and most intriguingly—short stanzas/paragraphs, sometimes only a single line, that read as either prose or verse, doggedly riding the fine line between the two for as long as possible. This, more than her Wonderland, makes The Agency of Wind a dizzying and magical encounter with language; serious readers of prose poetry should not fail to make its acquaintance, though it will surely challenge the stability of their preconceptions. --Rain Taxi Online

Which way to the windmaker's door?
If you want to know that you'll have to ask the doormaker.
A riddling, wind-activated poem describing the transformative adventures of a girl and a crane. Page after page, deckled with light, whistle headfirst into a journey, a conversation, a host of insoluble dilemmas, "questions swept over a chasm." The Agency of Wind yields the imaginative pleasures of a Leonora Carrington painting with the verbal vivacity and exactitude already characteristic of a Laynie Browne.
-- C.D. Wright

There is an address to and from innocence in Laynie Browne's writing. Her poetry is a key with which to recover a refreshed dreamscape, but there's a catch. With the agency of wind as one's portal and only anchor, there are no doors and locks to fit the key. Instead, one must swallow it through the pupil of one's eye extending a fearlessness and trust in a world where walls "are moving curtains" and "the chairs have blown away." The unnamed "she" discovers a series of portals, all announcing and witnessing in gorgeous detail the ornaments of her own beginnings, "as if a negative were to be placed underneath her skin."
-- Andrew Levy