[caption id="attachment_1352" align="alignleft" width="294" caption="Deborah Brown. BOA poet."][/caption] Deborah Brown's debut poetry collection entitled Walking the Dog's Shadow recieved an outstanding review from Rain Taxi Magazine.  Her work features poetry of memories and refections by a speaker who is "mature and wise."  The collection uses the concrete world to discover implicit realities in walking the shadow of a dog or losing the moon from the sky.  Brown's poety, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and published by BOA Editions, leads the reader off the road of familiarity into the creative and imaginative unfamilar.

Rain Taxi Magazine commented that Brown's poety draws on careful refections and memories which become discussions of the abstract, absent and real.  Her poetry seeks to create and define impressions, rather than things in themselves.  She puts "focus on what's not present" by featuring things that are missing or by leaving "words unspoken."  Brown's work forces the reader to put aside questions and follow the speakers lead into a new direction of understandings "what's here and what's not."  To miss the speaker's directive voice means also to miss the road toward "the unfamiliar."

The abstraction of Brown's work does not hinder the quality and beauty of her poetry but "tell us to pay close attention" to the "wisdom of the speaker."  Brown's poetry in Walking the Dog's Shadow opens the mind of the reader to appreciate what is thought-provokingly real, subtly absent, and daringly remembered.