Cameron Brooks

Praise for Forbearance

"In lines taut as a drum or the stakes of a tent of meeting, we meet in Brooks’ Forbearance a restraint that belies an urgent strength, poems training us for some contest or some kingdom here and sure to come—as sinewy and hale a debut as I’ve seen."

— Mischa Willett, author of The Elegy Beta and Phases

Cameron Brooks's debut book is about forbearance, but capably avoids falling into sepia-toned stoicism. Instead, Brooks's collection offers a delicate, keening sense of all that is beautiful, fleeting, as well as what endures without ever becoming maudlin. The sense that time is moving as swiftly as wind through tall grass imbues these poems as in "McKennan's Golden Hour" when the narrator recounts, "Fretting about the coming weeks/ which are by now many weeks gone by..." Brooks is also a musician, and it shows. Even the titles of the poems sound like lyrics to a song, such as "The Cottonwoods Were Sowing Starry Seeds," and they are just as pleasurable to read.

— Eliza Blue, folk singer and author of Little Pasture on the Prairie

"'To savor the contingency of being' could be the mission statement of Cameron Brooks’s Forbearance, a gorgeously written evocation and meditation on life lived among the prairies, orchards, flooded farms, 'gaunt silo[s]' of South Dakota's High Plains. Brooks loves words and their glorious mouthfeels as much as he loves the world itself: 'the ooze of too-ripe apples/beneath boots,' 'the cicada’s tymbal cry.'  In what he calls, with Stevensian grandeur, 'the verve/of fathomless particularities,/ becoming what they only could become,' Brooks savors, with bemused forbearance and stunned adoration, all the contingent and fleeing moments of 'the runaway chore of your life.'"

— Bruce Beasley, author of Prayershreds

"When reading Cameron Brooks’ Forbearance, the heart of his work spoke to me from lines describing our relationship with life, with the changing seasons, with ourselves, as 'longing after longing and longing again;' 'another day comes down to this: my sense that silence never proves an emptiness;' and 'not possible only, but probable that today’s most needful determination lies dormant among the caches of the past.' He is acutely aware of nature and how we occasionally cohabitate with it, but never rule it. We must make peace with these realities. I enjoyed the time spent with this book.

— Bruce Roseland, Poet Laureate of South Dakota

Poem: Winner of the South Dakota State Poetry Society 2023 Annual Contest

White Space

Awake to snow-freighted pines,
blue snow upon the pasture

where five shining horses graze
with snow in their manes. They

know grass has begun to grow
beneath the snow, having tasted

it only yesterday. A bruised bouquet
of dried chili peppers dangles

from the doorframe of my cabin
like a frozen claw. Crescent moons

of snow slouch in the nose slits
and eye sockets of a deer skull

pegged to a post, its antlers
and remaining teeth so dull

against unadulterated drifts
of snow, not white, not ivory,

just bone, the hollow color of bone.

What I'm Listening To

My 2025 Spotify playlist