Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Poetry

I HAD A BROTHER ONCE

Adam Mansbach

A Poem, A Memoir

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Adam Mansbach, a deeply personal, poignant, and courageous epic poem about the loss of his brother to suicide. I HAD A BROTHER ONCE is a moving and insightful meditation on the mysteries of grief, loss, mortality.

Adam Mansbach--when he was a young and mostly unknown jazz musician, rapper, poet, screenwriter, and novelist--had just had his first brush with fame from a most unlikely source: a book of rhyming couplets about putting his young daughter to sleep called GO THE F**K TO SLEEP, that had somehow improbably sold millions of copies and shot to the top of bestseller lists. Just as this new author's dreams were coming true--interviews on late-night and morning shows, standing-room only events, an audiobook read by Samuel L. Jackson and Werner Herzog (Ok, not all dreams make sense)--he received a call from his father, with devastating news about his older brother, David.

Excerpt from I HAD A BROTHER ONCE:
my father said
david has taken his own life
& i answered as if i didn't
understand or hadn't heard.
my reply was what?
& he
repeated it. there is plenty
to regret & perhaps this
is insignificant but i wish
i had not made him
say it to me twice.

In GO THE F**K TO SLEEP, Mansbach deftly captured for millions of readers the crazy ambiguity (and tension) of parenting a newborn - on one side the inexpressible love and the other side, the oh-so-many ways they drive us bonkers. In I HAD A BROTHER ONCE, he uses that same depth of feeling and his unique ability to find a fresh language for common human experience to illuminate the search for meaning within grief. This work is not just a beautifully rendered narrative of grief and the search for meaning in loss, but In a way also turns itself into a secular Kaddish for the dead.

Adam Mansbach is a novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic, and humorist. GO THE F**K TO SLEEP, has been translated into forty languages and sold over two million copies worldwide. THE 2014 sequel is of course, YOU HAVE TO F**KING EAT. His novels include RAGE IS BACK, ANGRY BLACK WHITE BOY, and THE END OF THE JEWS, winner of the California Book Award. Mansbach's novels and films have won prestigious awards. He has appeared on several tv interview programs and has written for magazines including but not limited toThe New Yorker and Esquire.

Available products
Book Published 2021-04-13 by One World

Comments

Poetry has always been the perfect vehicle for the unwieldy, intractable narrative - the pulsing injustice that refuses to dim, the love that swells unchecked, the numbing tragedy that bleeds past its borders. In "I Had A Brother Once" - Adam Mansbach's penetrative chronicle of his younger brother's suicide - there is an almost unbearable tension between an unrelenting poetic structure that just barely the contains the unthinkable, and the exhaustive emotional range of the poem itself... "I Had A Brother Once" humbly touts itself as "A Poem," but it is so, so much more than that. It is a love story, an unbridled wail, an effectual and resounding clash of heartache and art.

A bruised and brave love letter from a brother right here to a brother now gone. A soaring, unblinking gaze into the meaning of life itself.

This is a devastating, brilliant book. Somehow, in its completely authentic pain, it manages also to be full of life, at times even sweetly funny, maybe because we see struggles we recognize: of distance, of authenticity, of parenting, of performance, of love. This book feels deeply necessary, not just for the writer, but for all of us.

I Had a Brother Once is a brave, heartrending, and compelling book. It is consoling with no false notes, rich in both texture and feeling. Adam Mansbach has written a remarkable memoir.

A piercing poetic meditation on death, grief, and family... A wounded though loving paean that will speak to anyone who has lost a sibling, no matter the cause of death.

In this heartbreaking, brutally candid memoir, Mansbach employs long stanzas of free verse to recount events surrounding his brother's death, struggling through anger, sorrow, and confusion. Poetic conventions allow him to retreat into form, to distill the endless refrains of condolence in a way that recreates the time grief occupies in tragedy's immediate aftermath... For an author who has written everything from screenplays to middle-grade novels to wildly popular picture books, this courageous and devastating memoir in verse stands out.

You've never read a book like this one, with such heart and such grace. Mansbach unpacks a kind of loss most of us will never experience, and builds something at once majestic and intimate: a tribute, a totem, a life.