“In Apprentice to a Breathing Hand, Browne has convoked an opulent meditation on feminist practice and presence. This is a book of the phenomenologies of intention as functions of the senses: the five physical senses, yes, but also the other senses, that drive the self towards the ‘calm words’ that bracket both empathy and ephemerality. As far as instructions for living go, Browne ‘tries to explain’ but prefers to show, after the manner of Julian of Norwich. The terms of ‘wanting yourself back’ are dual: garner on the one hand, oracular on the other.”

G.C. Waldrep, author of feast gently

“Browne writes the path forward in this luminous manuscript where language is alchemy, the mercury in a medium that dissolves and reconstructs the self by growing tendrils under her own banner. Apprentice to a Breathing Hand is a brilliant lyrical achievement.”

Brenda Coultas, author of The Writing of an Hour

“‘The women who ask bodies to be present and constant are dancers’—a proposition suggesting that significance and signification are ever-present, awaiting the activation of attention. Lyric address to a beloved ‘you,’ dilated to include the fictive, the plural, and the non-human is one such activation offered by Apprentice to a Breathing Hand. Also: the release of song and chant that harbor in speech alongside the histories that shelter in etymologies. Here we learn to believe in the agency of expansion and preservation, energetic forces by which the word and its selves blossom.”

Karla Kelsey, author of On Certainty