Navy Brat, by Suzanne Burns

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Navy Brat is a memoir-in-verse chapbook that inhabits the charged, feral landscapes of military housing. Set in Ewa Beach, Hawaii during the late Cold War years, the book traces a girlhood shaped by temporary neighborhoods and shared yards. These poems move through games, objects, rituals, and small violences with a precise, unsentimental eye. Across its sequence, Navy Brat examines how girls learn about power and desire, long before they have language for them, through scratch-and-sniff stickers, dollhouses, abandoned furniture, sea monkeys, and pink plastic treasures ordered from the backs of comic books. The speaker’s voice remains grounded in the child’s perspective, allowing the poems to expose systemic inequities without retrospective moralizing. At once tender and unsparing, Navy Brat offers a collective memory of growing up in spaces designed to be impermanent. The children in these pages build worlds from what is left behind and learn, early on, how easily those worlds can disappear. Suzanne Burns is a writer whose work spans poetry, fiction, and memoir, often exploring girlhood, desire, power, and the surreal textures of everyday life. She is the author of numerous books, including Look at All the Colors Hidden There (Galileo Press, 2025), Now It Seems That I Am Not Here at All (Tailwinds Press, 2023), Boys (University of Hell Press, 2018), and The Veneration of Monsters (Dzanc Books, 2017), among others. Her writing has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, and her work has been reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews (including a starred review and Top 100 Book of the Year selection), Ms. Magazine, and Booklist. She lives in Oregon.