If Brit Washburn were a painter she would be like Vermeer, following a certain slant of illumination into a dimly lit interior, drawing our attention to the pear on the table, or the child’s tiny curled hand. Here is a poetry of clarity and finely wrought detail, that never fails to render what is present, regardless of its tragedy or beauty, and insisting on both. The poems in Notwithstanding hover, as the title suggests, between the presence of what is, despite that which is not. A lover whom we long for despite our leaving, the golden child we knew inside the troubled young man, the lives we build that fail to nurture us, what we ate, remembered, forgot to remember.  Few poets venture into the shadows of romantic love and motherhood with the courage that Washburn brings, examining a decade of choices and their results with a clear-eyed measure. The language here is constantly pressing against the safe path, arguing for a life that is lived fully, tragically, joyously. What is the pleasure of now, these poems ask, the taste of ripe fruit, a child’s embrace? And what if now is all we have?

- Barbara Roether

“Brit Washburn's Notwithstanding introduces a true talent, every well-crafted poem is as wise as it is earned. It is a book of love and loss and the sensuality of food and nature, qualities often blended in poem after poem. It's a book that stays home, ‘one season slipping into the next...’ about which she says, ‘I’ve been through this before: I know how to eat and swim and sleep alone, how to savor a sensation without sharing it, how to carry on.’ An exquisite sensibility at work here.”

—Stephen Dunn, author of Different Hours, (W. W. Norton & Company), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

“Each time I return to Brit Washburn’s sublime debut, Notwithstanding, I am reminded of Alain de Botton’s remark that literature is an instrument that sensitizes the reader to her world through the lenses of writers with ‘sophisticated radars.’ To view the world through Washburn’s particular lens is to perceive the numinous in the ordinary objects, routines, and constraints of domestic life. In a voice at once intimate and controlled, the poet takes pleasure wherever she can find it: soup, sex, fugitive fruit, the cant of light on a bed, the music of language in her mouth—even grief is made exquisite in its power to return her to the sensual world. Whenever I am inside Washburn’s poems, the world grows realer, I feel more alive, sensitized again to all the beauty and precarity of my fleeting life.”

—Lisa R. Wells, author of The Fix, winner of 2018 Iowa Prize for Poetry, and Believers, finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2021.

Aubade

The birds have not lost 

their religion: they sing

to make the sun rise 

every morning, a chorus

at the forest’s edge, 

on the mountain top

where the dawn can be

seen to overtake the dark,

first light illuminating

February’s golden grasses

against the gray sky, growing

gradually pale until

the clouds blush,

bouquets of carnations tossed

toward the heavens, hopeless

romantic that this planet is:

ready to give

each day its dowry

despite the unlikelihood

that it will have her.

And the birds, the birds

bestow their blessings.

- from Notwithstanding, Wet Cement Press, 2019