Phil Brown: Review of his new book Confessions of a Minor Poet

MEMOIR

Confessions of a Minor Poet

Phil Brown

Transit Lounge, $32.99

The cover photo of Confessions of a Minor Poet features Phil Brown: floofy white-haired, black-rimmed glasses, with his hands on his face staring directly and unsmilingly at us. The one on the back is a portrait of him as a young man, tapping away on his trusty typewriter with a reference book nearby. He looks for all the world like a prim, industrious journo focused on breaking a story, or maybe he is in the midst of translating poetic snippets from handwriting to print.

Both photos display Brown as a serious fellow, but such gravitas is undermined by the actual contents of this memoir: despite some of the heavier material, (substance abuse, bad health, familial woes and a nervous breakdown, aka “existentialitis”)