ABOUT
Brandon Rushton is the author of The Air in the Air Behind It (Tupelo Press, September 2022), selected by Bin Ramke for the 2020 Berkshire Prize. He was born and raised in Michigan. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and the American Poetry Review / Honickman Book Prize, his individual poems have received awards from Gulf Coast and Ninth Letter and appear widely in publications like The Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Bennington Review, and Passages North. His essays appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Terrain.org, the critical anthology, A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke (Ohio University Press, 2020), and have been listed as notable by Best American Essays. He co-founded the non-profit poetry outfit Oxidant | Engine and, after earning his MFA from the University of South Carolina, joined the writing faculty at the College of Charleston. From 2020 - 2023, he served as a Visiting Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
In The Air in the Air Behind It, Brandon Rushton has miraculously mapped a poetics of human geology. Here is a meteorology of how “we call forth our breath from the passing /cloud.” Absurd, witty, sad, reverent, irreverent, profound, this work partakes in a “partial obfuscation of the self” to enact a kind of omnipresence.
- Arra Lynn Ross
"Brandon Rushton’s The Air in the Air Behind It understands, and leads us to understand, we are bound to each other, and to this earth, because all is change. This is a book that holds such truths, necessary to weathering our time."
- Karla Kelsey