by Lauren Thompson
Where Brown’s debut collection Graffiti felt like comfort, and Sweet Dark felt like growing up, Closer Baby Closer feels like heartbreak
Sealed with a kiss, Closer Baby Closer drips with sardonic wit. Diving deep into the core of modern love and dating in the digital age, Savannah Brown explores the depths of what it means to be human and vulnerable in a world of dick pics, thirst traps, and messages left on read.
Short but definitely not sweet, this cryptic collection is split into three exquisite parts. With each, Brown laments the balance of power and control in everything from sex, Jeff Bezos’ manic texts, to gnarly kerbside pigeons and the chokehold of ex-lovers.
My singular sweetness, I could never hate you <
I hate your power <
I hate your hurting hands <
Brown examines the pale underbelly of what it means to be in love. The vulnerability that whittles even the wealthiest of cyborgs down into powerless, manic weirdos. Like a dark little mirror held up to all our insecurities, our relationships to others and the world around us are a reflection of the many fucked up insecurities we all face, magnified here by the prism of technology and the sickening allure of the internet. An archive of fractured body parts and secrets, our shame laid bare for all to see.
Related: Tender Buttons episode #4 The Poetry of the Mundane
Where Brown’s debut collection Graffiti felt like comfort, and Sweet Dark felt like growing up, Closer Baby Closer feels like heartbreak. Like shouting into the void, and hearing the void shout right back across the static and frenzy of existence.
Breathing with morbid desire, love, death and all things digital coexist and collide with shattering urgency. The very human desire for connection and closeness sits just as truthfully alongside the desire to extract pain like dirt in a cut. Lovers to muted profiles, blocked, barred and permanently removed from the landscape of one’s personal existence. Closer Baby Closer marvels at how easily we’re able to feel close, and how easily we can create distance. A great chasm of space where sweet nothings and pet names immortalised in pixels once existed.
‘Want me how a sentence wants an end, how a memory wants to be spoken. With the urgency of breath when the bag is finally removed from the head.’
Fiendishly playful and profound, yet deeply mordant and satirical, Closer Baby Closer invites us all to honour our heartbreak and neuroses, take a breath, and collectively eye roll. Yes, there’s romance, but there’s also pure carnal lust and desire. ‘The short stretch of time where the mind outlives the body and consider(s) masturbating’. Yes there’s existentialism, the speculation of what all of this might mean. There’s also the utter absurdity of what desire can drive us to do — the bare digital tits of someone you know hurdle through cyberspace — and Savannah Brown captures it all in her latest, and arguably best poetry collection to date.
Pick up a copy of Closer Baby Closer as an act of self-love this Valentine’s Day, 14th February 2023: https://www.doomsdaypress.co.uk/product-page/closer-baby-closer
Lauren Thompson is a copywriter, editor, and freelance content creator. She has written for Little White Lies, Filmoria, Taylor Magazine & more