A Brief History of Accidental Inventions explores the emotionally fraught territory of pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood. By equal measures harrowing and humorous, the collection chronicles the speaker's freefall into postpartum depression against the backdrop of American gun culture and the repeal of Roe v. Wade. The poems peer keenly into texts from Kristeva to Kim Kardashian's Instagram account as the speaker searches for clarity in her new role as a mother. With a voice both lyrical and brash, Craft confronts challenges of embodiment and violence alongside the overwhelming experience of maternal love. 21st Century Poets, No. 47
Dorsey Craft is the author of A Brief History of Accidental Inventions, Plunder (Bauhan 2020), and two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Ph.D. program for Creative Writing at The Florida State University, Craft teaches at the University of North Florida and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Agni.
"This book is full of gorgeous perversity. It refuses to bullshit readers with sentimentality-about pregnancy, motherhood, and simply existing as a body in the world. And the imagery of this world is surreal and morbidly funny: "Babies are so like guns: their heavy heads filled / with potential." And in this world, love and desire are never far removed from violence: "If I was a dove, I'd coast in low, make men // shoot each other if they want to get at me." But, movingly, the speaker refuses to let this violence erode her humanity: "Lie on the pine floor and die / again and again in your foolish love / for the world." Friends, Dorsey Craft is an audacious, tender, wicked poet." -Nicky Beer, author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes "In A Brief History of Accidental Inventions, the greatest invention is the speaker. She's forthright, witty, lyrical, and reflective. I'm awestruck by the range of subjects the speaker attends to, explores. Pregnancy, a fraught delivery, friendship, football and tailgating, metaphor, and gun violence trouble the imagination of the speaker. Dorsey Craft's brilliant control of the poetic line, cadence, and imagery has allowed her to forge an indelible speaker, to write an incredible book." -Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine and Slow Lightning "Dorsey Craft's A Brief History of Accidental Inventions is a book of ferocious, crackling energy. Her language is electric and funny, her imagery a delicious jolt. Craft writes with face-slapping frankness about how love and savagery feed each other; how the predator within us comes alive every time we root for our team, birth a child, tally the deaths we didn't die. A Brief History of Accidental Inventions is a brutal, exhilarating, wild collection." -Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater "This book is full of gorgeous perversity. It refuses to bullshit readers with sentimentality-about pregnancy, motherhood, and simply existing as a body in the world. And the imagery of this world is surreal and morbidly funny: "Babies are so like guns: their heavy heads filled / with potential." And in this world, love and desire are never far removed from violence: "If I was a dove, I'd coast in low, make men // shoot each other if they want to get at me." But, movingly, the speaker refuses to let this violence erode her humanity: "Lie on the pine floor and die / again and again in your foolish love / for the world." Friends, Dorsey Craft is an audacious, tender, wicked poet." -Nicky Beer, author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes "In A Brief History of Accidental Inventions, the greatest invention is the speaker. She's forthright, witty, lyrical, and reflective. I'm awestruck by the range of subjects the speaker attends to, explores. Pregnancy, a fraught delivery, friendship, football and tailgating, metaphor, and gun violence trouble the imagination of the speaker. Dorsey Craft's brilliant control of the poetic line, cadence, and imagery has allowed her to forge an indelible speaker, to write an incredible book." -Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine and Slow Lightning "Dorsey Craft's A Brief History of Accidental Inventions is a book of ferocious, crackling energy. Her language is electric and funny, her imagery a delicious jolt. Craft writes with face-slapping frankness about how love and savagery feed each other; how the predator within us comes alive every time we root for our team, birth a child, tally the deaths we didn't die. A Brief History of Accidental Inventions is a brutal, exhilarating, wild collection." -Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater "My baby has become a gun," writes Dorsey Craft, loading a metaphor into the chamber of A Brief History of Accidental Inventions. It's a metaphor that yokes by force the pillar of mainstream American femininity-motherhood-and the pillar of mainstream American masculinity-violence; a metaphor that is utterly shocking because it is so apt. This is an explosive book that takes precise aim at gender conformity, a work that has the power to obliterate, but cannot be forgotten." -Eleanor Boudreau, author of Earnest, Earnest "Dorsey Craft writes with a knife-edge tenderness. Across this book's radiant and unsettling terrain, images of motherhood, power, violence, nationhood-and art-making itself-combine and reverberate in strange and intelligent ways. The experience of reading these poems is intimate, ecstatic, and terrifying. A Brief History of Accidental Inventions is a book of precision and moral daring, a gorgeous reckoning with how we inherit and reinvent the myths that make us human." -Jenny George, author of After Image and The Dream of Reason
