Navigation describes an arc of passage guided by the uncertain stars Corrigan’s grandfather revealed to her and those he kept hidden. In Navigation, Corrigan enters the unchartered waters and unmapped lands where she must establish the way not only for herself, but for her child with autism. Navigation is a fluid narrative about not only generations, but the act of generating one’s own life both inside and outside of the boundaries laid by family.
Published by The Habit of Rainy Nights Press in April, 2012
Praise for Navigation:
“Brittney Corrigan’s poems are richly narrative, deeply engaging, and warm. And they always have been. She writes poems that matter to other people because they emerge so authentically from the life she is living at every wonderful and mysterious moment. Every confounding and haunting moment. Her fine poems carry you into themselves and back into your own life with more vigor and understanding.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye
“In Brittney Corrigan’s poems dailiness is transfigured so that we are always seeming to meet the ordinary dramas of life in unexpected ways, and with the gift of unexpected insight. Her poems are full of ‘just the thing/you think you know/but you don’t,’ brought to us in language that is at once welcoming and deeply meditative. If her work has a tutelary deity it is the god of small things, who is also, of course, the god of the biggest things. After reading these poems, we know they are one and the same.”
– Ger Killeen
“‘My hands are full of small eggs, small flowers,/delicate hope. What of this is ordinary?’ writes Brittney Corrigan, and in her poems the answer is that the pulse of every day is made extraordinary as she chronicles the struggles and joys of family in a voice all too aware of a difficult world made all the more dear by our precarious place in it.”
– Maxine Scates
“Brittney Corrigan writes with piercing honesty about the bedeviling emotional challenges of parenting a child with autism: the guilt we feel over our seeming inadequacies, our finite patience, the moments we seem to favor the more typical sibling. I love Brittney’s poetry because it is neither pity party nor self-flagellation, but rather hope-infused, forward-thinking ‘truthiness’ that feels like an arm around the shoulder saying, ‘Yeah, we can do this.’”
– Ellen Notbohm
“Brittney Corrigan, in her poetry, has a way of slowing us down, showing us what we might have missed, because we were walking too quickly past our lives.”
– Kerry Cohen
“Corrigan’s poetry pairs the ordinary and the extraordinary through gestures of intimacy and solid landmarks of place. This narrative of Navigation, looking up to the heavens and scanning the landscape of the close at hand, unveils insight and questions, both answered and unanswered. The poems lift the invisible to the visible opening us the knowing of both the big and little things of home and family constellations. “I don’t question how angels come”… “Were we ever headed anywhere else?” Corrigan’s poems are crafted with a fine diamond chisel.”
– Mimi Maduro
Brittney Corrigan 