Move Over Mountain

J. New Books, 2019

Move Over Mountain is a poetic and starkly moving novel for readers who contemplate life's difficult questions and fear their simplest answers.

In the span of one winter, John Underwood, a quiet and distant sixty-eight-year old man is suddenly forced to reckon with the present moment when his wife Sylvia is rendered unconscious, hospitalized, and left lingering somewhere between life and death.

Plagued by epilepsy, John fears that, as his seizures continue, he will eventually lose all memory of his wife if she dies. Day after day, he sits at her bedside, clinging desperately onto all of the precious moments of quiet, ordinary life, hoping to make sense of what brought him to this painful moment.

As winter approaches and John refuses to let Sylvia go, he is tormented by his own gnawing conscience, urging him to reach out to his estranged daughter, Valerie. As the dark battle against his fearful heart rages on, a glimmer of hope emerges when John meets his grandson for the first time.

Set against the backdrop of the rural North Carolina mountains, Move Over Mountain tells the story of one man's fall into the grips of self-made fear and isolation, and his journey to find redemption.

Praise for Move Over Mountain

“In this powerful debut novel, Spencer Brown brings us the moving story of John Underwood, a man unexpectedly forced to face the most heartbreaking decision any spouse would need to make. And as we share Underwood's anxieties, despair, hopes, and regrets we share too his realization of how all the choices in our lives, made by us and for us, affect irrevocably how we shape all the lives we touch, especially as parents. Brown's writing is stunning and beautiful. It has been a long time since a novel has made me contemplate my own humanity and mortality so compellingly. Move Over Mountain will stay with you long after the final page.”

—Ray Morrison, author of I Hear the Human Noise

“From the first lyrical page, Spencer Brown engages the reader in a timeless meditation on memory, love, and loss. As John waits at the bedside of his stricken wife Sylvia, he undertakes an Orphean journey into the underworld of memory, where love seems to be always dissolving into the shades. It's a portrait of a complex, wounded man, and we find ourselves like him waiting in the darkness outside a shut door, grieving our unshared guilt. There is light shining under that door, however, and the hope of understanding and reconciliation when we're prepared for it to open. Move Over Mountain will stay with you.”

—Valerie Nieman, author of To the Bones

“Move Over Mountain introduces us to John, an aging man who's convinced himself he doesn't need anyone but his wife, then finds himself losing her. In captivating, lucid prose, Spencer K.M. Brown gives us a look at a profound inner journey and an ongoing struggle with faith as John reckons with his own gnarled history. Both a rage against the dying of the light and a celebration of what was once illuminated, Move Over Mountain is an elegiac meditation on loss, regret, and the enigmatic reasons we find to survive.”

—Steve Mitchell, author of Cloud Diary

Cicada Rex: Poems

Ghostcity Press, 2023

In this vivid, contemplative, far-reaching, yet wholly plain-spoken collection of moments appearing as lenses through which to see the world beyond our moments, Cicada Rex brings readers the debut of a virtuoso exploration of the power of concision in lyric poetry - a testament to the infinitesimal moments of life that the poet makes truly profound as he turns them in his palm calling to mind the natural scenes of Chinese Zen poems. Blending beautiful lyricism with the stark eye and voice of the everyday, Cicada Rex marks the entrance of a riveting new voice in American poetry.

Praise for Cicada Rex

“The poems in Spencer Brown’s debut collection make music from the small moments of noticing all around. Here, ‘Everything rises in the cold,’ and there is a sense of hope among a fragile world the poet asks us to enter. As the poet writes, this collection transforms language into a landscape we might traverse, or simply sit down and watch the way the light breaks through a stand of trees. These are poems of faith and parenthood, of reverie and lineage, all with an eye turned toward what waits over time’s horizon. A beautiful book of poetry I will return to again and again.”

— Matthew Wimberley, author of Daniel Boone's Window and All the Great Territories

“In tender, plainspoken poems, Cicada Rex yearns to slow the world down to the dead crawl of the aching human heart. At this devotional speed—slower than our clocks, slower even than the arcs of the stars—these poems hear what hums below our workaday concerns. But the approach here isn’t transcendence; rather, Brown’s stance is refreshingly practical: ‘The house smells like someone died here because someone died here.’ As modern life bombards our attention and demands an endless to-do list, this poet quietly refuses—choosing, instead, to be ‘like these turtles in / The sun, waiting for that brief moment / When nothing becomes something.’”

—Anders Carlson-Wee, author of Disease of Kings