A Little Grief Break: The Collected Poems

A Little Grief Break is a thirty-year retrospective from one of contemporary poetry’s most electrifying voices--a collection that refuses to sit still. Derrick C. Brown has spent three decades honing a singular poetic style that marries devastating emotional precision with sharp humor, bar-stool philosophy with literary craft, and the raw immediacy of performance with the carefully wrought architecture of the page. This 300-page collection gathers the essential poems from Brown’s ten previous books alongside nineteen new works in Night Collapser, creating a portrait of a poet who has never stopped taking risks. Here are poems that detonate with laughter before breaking your heart in the next breath.

Publishing. His innovative fusion of poetry and comedy earned Paste Magazine’s Comedy Album of the Year (2023). The New York Times praises his work as ＂a rekindling of faith in the weird, hilarious, shocking, beautiful power of words.＂ A former paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, Brown has authored ten poetry collections and four children’s books, winning the Texas Book of the Year award for Poetry. He serves as the 2025/26 Poet Laureate of Los Feliz, California, and often tours via motorcycle, bringing his explosive performances to venues worldwide.