TOP 40 (Another Volume)
by Brandon Brown
“Hit me baby, one more time.” A decade ago, Bay Area writer Brandon Brown created a new poetic form out of the American Top 40 Charts that rank the week’s most frequently played radio hits. Influenced by his New Narrative forebears, Brown performed an orchestral “writing through” of pop culture detritus, mashing up close readings of the hottest songs of the moment with confessional writing of Augustinian intensity while making unexpected literary connections to ancient history. Susan Landers commented, “How endless this poetry will make us.” Spinning us ’round (like a record, baby), history’s repeating!
Oops, he did it again. Ten years down the line, Brown revisits the Top-40 playlist—and it turns out, a lot has changed! This isn’t a sequel. This isn’t even like the time Taylor Swift re-recorded her early albums due to rights issues. Top 40 (Another Volume) is a brand-new sonic adventure. This is a book that anyone can pick up and read; it will provide a friendly embrace, like a miracle on the dancefloor. But fans of the previous Top 40 will find the poet navigating familiar issues like substance use or Bay Area gentrification as well as entirely new challenges like parenthood and aging. Brown has lived more and lost more. Fall Out Boy’s crass rewrite of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” becomes an unexpected platform to mourn a mentor. Kylie Minogue’s summer hit “Padam Padam” evokes a painfully unresolved friendship. Take a long drive with the radio on. In this long-anticipated follow-up to one of Roof Book’s classic titles, Brandon Brown shows us new ways of listening to and engaging with culture.
Praise for Top 40 (Another Volume)
“If, as Brandon Brown posits in Top 40 (Another Volume), ‘The mind’s the muscle that hypertrophies with love I guess,’ then pop music—as much as ancient Greek philosophy or psilocybin—is the anabolic steroid that swells the head and heart with agape in this raucous and tender collection of poems. An annotated soundtrack to getting through this thing called life, Top 40 (Another Volume) rightfully insists that all songs are love songs so long as we know how to listen.”
—Matt Sussman
“It’s ten years later, and the songs Brandon Brown writes through in this new Top 40 (Another Volume) are more ready to die for you, baby, and to throw themselves into that great Heraclitean Fire that promises the comfort of resurrection. The poet takes part in the same cycle of self-consuming generation, but he is giving life. Brown collaborates with Kylie, devastatingly, to bring back the dead, while he reads aloud to newborn Earlie and petitions oracles to tell us how our future blood might pump. You know how music makes you nostalgic for lovers you never lost? Brown does the same, but for experiences like studying Spinoza with Lyn Hejinian. He makes the private popular.”
—Rainer Diana Hamilton
About the Author
Brandon Brown Brandon Brown is the author of several books including, most recently, Work (Atelos) and The Four Seasons (Wonder). In 2024, Free Poetry published his translation of the extant works of the troubadour Raimbaut d'Aurenga, Joy Is My Hotel. In 2026, Roof Books will publish a new book, Top 40 (Another Volume). Brown's writing on art and culture has appeared in Art in America, Frieze, The Believer, Fanzine among other venues. He has been the recipient of the Beauchamp Prize for Critical Art Writing and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in poetry. He is a co-editor at Krupskaya Books and publishes the zine Panda's Friend. He lives in Richmond, CA.