Warm Auditorium

James Brown’s fifth book of poetry moves through personal lyrics, narrative desire, and short takes, before arriving at a climactic antipoetry. Warm Auditorium is Brown at his most formally diverse, with rhyme, tongue-twisters, lists, monologues, and prose poems. Within its cleverness, humor, and verve lies a deep fascination with poetry—how its mechanics can be co-opted and subverted and why it remains a vital form of expression. It is perhaps the best answer to its own poetic challenges.