Motherhood and housewifery and other worldly concerns of the female artist-provider ride rampant here in this bustling exploding book of prose & poem meditations. Laynie Browne tells it “slant.” These are the erotics of our letters (alphabetic duty) working for us as well as epistles to the world that capture & hold synaptic energy, quotidian urgency & secret delight. I feel like “personism” came back into the neighborhood. Onward & outward from Basra to dream realms to jaunts of imagination and friendship. One of our best writers does it again.

—Anne Waldman

This book is such a perfect fantasy. It is an homage to Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters. But as it is written by Laynie Browne, it is a different book. And yet it is just as transformative and all that I loved so much about the original book—its negotiation of the global and the domestic, beauty made bittersweet with annoyance and exhaustion, all that advice about how to raise a child and write at the same time—is there. I’ve long thought of The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters as a sort of handbook to having it all. And yet I also knew there was so much more to learn. So I am grateful to be able to also have The Desires of Letters.   

—Juliana Spahr