Buxton Books is excited to welcome author and poet Brit Washburn to the bookstore for a reading from her latest collection What is Given. Brit was previously based in Charleston and is making a trip back to celebrate this new work with us! Friends and fans alike are invited to join us in the bookstore for this very special evening.
Please email rsvp@buxtonbooks.com so we can save you a seat and some refreshments!
About What is Given:
Elegant, luxurious and full of courageous witness, Washburn’s poems walk around the lake of living, pointing out the broken surfaces and what shines there. “All things inexplicable, indefensible,/ Frightening.” This work claims as its territory the world as we find it, in its flux and flaws; and how we find, or sometimes lose, ourselves within. Following several love affairs through their dissolution and reformation, amidst the ruins of covid and the redemptions of gardens, sex, food, and children; the poet finds that what is given is always more than it seems. In a voice deeply attuned to the sensual these poems reveal “how what begins with naming/ becomes about relationship, / attention the beginning/ of devotion.” Here is a wise voice of experience that guides us to consider delight, among all the things we are given.
Part daybook on living a meaningful life, part phenomenological treatise, What Is Given is a field guide to the interior. Again and again, we are brought to places and difficulties and moments of grace, and each time, a wise guide directs our eye, shows us what lies underneath, and offers a way forward.” —Sebastian Matthews, author of In My Father’s Footsteps
“In poems acutely aware of loss, Washburn comes back to the redeeming beauty of the sensual world. These are poems infused with love and a profound trust in, as she titles one of her poems, ‘the radical hospitality of the senses.’ With poetry that reminds us to be grateful for what is given, Washburn establishes herself as a necessary poet for our difficult times.” —Ed Falco, author of X in the Tickseed
About Brit Washburn:
Brit Washburn is the author of the essay collection Homing In: Attempts on a Life of Poetry and Purpose (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2023), and the poetry collections Notwithstanding (Wet Cement Press, 2019) and What Is Given (Wet Cement Press, 2025). She is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Interlochen Arts Academy in Northern Michigan, where she was born and raised, and of Goddard College in Vermont. Brit has been awarded an artist's grant by the Vermont Studio Center and for many years served on the boards of the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the Low Country Initiative on the Literary Arts (LILA). She co-directed the salon Poets House South and has worked as a freelance writer, editor, and indexer, a Montessori teacher, and instructor in the Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina Asheville. She is the mother of four and a student in the MFA program at Virginia Tech. Her work can be found in print and online via www.britwashburn.com.