Scraped Knees

In her debut poetry chapbook, Kristine Brown captains thirty-nine beautifully crafted poems and stories that bite with honesty. Scraped Knees is an exploration in sensory details; an incense-thickened yet clear-eyed look into the often hazy world around us. Brown scratches at the surface of tender obscurities-fear, love, loneliness-while ripping the scab right off our more tangible struggles-domestic abuse, homelessness, first dates, and suicide hotlines. The poems churn like an ocean. At times choppy, with sharp, staccato notes, the pains of a speaker grown and still growing; and then again calm, driven by lilting, lullaby-like prose that carries the speaker, and the reader, gently to shore.