Well-named and powerful, Naked Thoughts (Gilberte Publishing, 2025) by multi-award-winning writer Marina Brown contains 58 poems that invite readers into beauty and soul-searching along with her poetic syntax. These poems will haunt you long after the final line as Brown’s artistry conjures images both unforgettable and of the deepest beauty.

In what is perhaps her most personal publication yet, Brown looks at the pandemic years, a medical crisis, current world difficulties, the beauty of nature, marriage, and more with precise language and penetrating gaze—and always with empathy. In verses with stunning images and deep insights, she does not hide from the world we live in but bears witness to many of its sorrows, including the graphic “not quite marching” ghosts of our dead children in the poem “Prioritize.” Yet, Brown  also finds grace and loveliness, even joy, in other poems, as in “The Adolescent Plant” with its “mayfly on an anonymous leaf, / a little joy-rider too lazy to flap a stained-glass wing.”

This is a poet and artist with a discerning literary mind who is paying close attention and opening her full array of senses—and generously sharing what she perceives. Her free verse and prose poems are meticulous, musical, sensory-rich, and created with academic rigor. Her storytelling talents, also evident in her numerous novels, reverberate throughout the collection, as do her journalistic skills. As she says in her opening note: “we walk along a sine wave, an undulating ribbon of joy and sorrow, horror and resilient rebirths.” Marina Brown offers her readers “a firm grip and love” with these poems “until the sun comes up and we begin to dance again.”

If there is a unifying theme, it is best found in her poem “When the Guests Go Home,” where she writes: “‘All of us here together,’ she whispers to herself in the green- / tinted air. And the bird hears.” The connectivity that permeates this collection is found not only in this observation of “all” being “here together,” but also profoundly in “There is a Place for Her.” In that verse, the poet awaits her Muse, as do all things who wait for their inspiration.

Yet, like all here, I wait, as does the spider tip-toeing toward me,
and the shy wren in whose chirp I hear the croak of boredom.
We wait for our own muse, our own heart’s desire
whether arriving in rain, or seed, or a carrion nibble,…

“When the Guests Go Home” not only delivers that empathic, unifying line of “all of us here together,” but also reflects another running theme in the collection—that all things have a consciousness, even a soul. Here Brown says, “And the mosquito sits without biting. The moss curls toward an out-late butterfly.” In “Before the Slip,” Brown observes the “white feral cat pretending at being a daffodil,” the bread dough starters that “bubble in delight,” while a “randy” owl is “hooting lust to his harem who wish he’d just shut up and sleep.” More connections to our waiting world come in “From a Morning Driveway,” where “haughty flowers will vie in extravagance with more fecund weeds,” and “shadows pretend to be zebras that outrace the sun.” And in the poem “Poetry Shards in December,” Brown gives water, which is “quivering in contemplation,” a consciousness with the line: “A water droplet on a leaf takes a chance with gravity, dancing at the end of the branch.”

Marina Brown’s affinity for all life gives these poems not only richness, but a spirituality that transcends the sorrows also found in her verses. Her talent—and vision—give mind, thought, and feelings to the life around us in ways that others might not perceive. For example, in “The Quiet Yes,” she writes in part:

I wonder what they’re thinking—all of them—for I believe they do “think.” At least pursue a goal. At least “strive,” one talon, one arthropodical foot, one wing, one fin, one outstretched root, or serpentine wiggle after another. Each of them not giving up—despite the insecticide and the loss of bugs for an evening meal. Despite the lack of rain which might quench a thirsty tree. Despite the heat that leaves flowers with bent heads and the garden wall a crematory for baby spiders reaching out to touch the world.

And yet—they persist…

Her sensitivities are so well-refined and acute that she can say (and we believe her) that “I sense the cool of the bug’s foot, ballet-stepped along my arm.” Brown, who is also a painter, shows her artistic awareness in such poems as “A Morning in April” as she writes:

I am coloring the air.
Wind waves that outline my fingers and hands—
Blue and green, turquoise where sunlight makes them dance—

She is also the master of stunning similes, as in this line from “The Quiet Yes,” where she writes: “Old azaleas withering like once-rich dowagers whose aging party dresses now cling to drooping skin.” In “Pebble Creek Pond,” she notes that as “mud eats the pond,” turtles and fish gasp for survival “at least attesting to determination—like little Ukrainians hoping for help.” Emotionally moving, “A Place of Our Own” describes being in a B&B while in Jacksonville, FL, receiving medical treatment. She and her husband “stand like timid children, hiding behind the curtain, hugging / the corner, stomping an occasional petulant foot.” Perhaps her most gut-wrenching simile is found in “The Eyes of a Child,” a poem about a school shooting from the child’s point of view: “I saw the gun. It was black and dull, and it waved back and forth / like a dragon finding what it wanted to eat.”

All in all, this is powerful, gorgeous, ultimately life-affirming poetry from someone whose zest for life and affinity for the living radiate from these pages with grace and power. It is no wonder, then, that this collection has garnered yet another accolade for Brown by being a Florida Authors and Publishers Association winner.

Marina Brown

A Florida resident, Marina Brown has been a professional ballet dancer, a hospice nurse, a blue-water sailor, an award-winning watercolorist, a cellist, journalist, novelist, and poet. She has won numerous national awards for her work. In addition to her creative writing, her articles appear in newspapers and regional magazines. She was honored with a Silver Medal from the Florida Authors and Publishers Association for her first poetry collection, The Leaf Does Not Believe It Will Fall. Her novels and short story collections include Land Without Mirrors (2013), Lisbeth (2017), and The Orphan of Pitigliano (2020), and they have all won Gold Medals from the FAPA. The Orphan of Pitigliano also won a Gold Medal and 2020 Book of the Year from the Florida Writers Association. Her short story collections include When Women Danced With Trees: 35 Unexpected Stories, which won a Gold Medal from the Florida Writers Association in 2022, and The Gentlemen of Verona (2024).

This copyrighted poem from Naked Thoughts appears in whole with permission of Marina Brown:

The Fish That Wouldn’t Swim Away

I think of you as a little fish, a perch perhaps, even a particularly smooth shrimp, but firm, a little hard-boiled, not a good swimmer, because you’re stuck under my arm, plunked down there, a stubborn lump winking at a nipple and trying hard to get all the attention on yourself, jealous maybe of tinted lips, thrice-brushed hair, or the new leather pants that make my rear look better than it has for years.

But you—Fish—fat minnow—‘buttinski’ into an already pandemic-circumscribed life, why won’t you just swim away, take a hint, lose some weight, shrivel and evaporate—rather than play with my thoughts in the quiet of the night with your presumptuous tail flips that only wrinkle my skin, but don’t make me admire you.

So, like a 50’s roadside attraction, filled with oddities and nature’s freaks that no longer make our eyes grow wide, I’m closing the aquarium, Fish. You’ll be tossed out to sea, shot down a drain pipe, or maybe just enjoy a cozy incineration along with your buddies, your ‘school’ mates already puffing their little nodules to take your place.

And therefore, we part, pestering Pisces. I tip my hat your way and thumb a nose in your direction. Do have a bon voyage. I hope you won’t feel the fileting.

Though actually, I do.

Instead, I hope it’s me who won’t feel the knife.