The Time at Darwin's Reef is primarily a book of storytelling through mixed genres--verse, prose, and painting. Brady's work is designed to draw out key dimensions of the poetics of anthropology and history embedded in creative writing--in the mix and on the margins of verse and prose, painting and writing, fiction and fact--to revisit the sometimes academically resistant idea that there is more than one way to say (and therefore to see) things.
From the Back Cover"The Time at Darwin's Reef is a direct response to the uncertainties attached to evidence, truth, and method in postmodernism. Brady has written in what is probably the only vein one could call 'authorized' by the new criticism and its attention to the misadventures and ruins of classical ethnography: ambiguous writing that 'rings true,' rather than being strictly historical or always factually true--the ancient power of fiction, poetry, performance, and storytelling....Darwin's Reef is an exemplar of experimental writing and an anti-book of the finest kind."
--Yvonna S. Lincoln, Texas A&M University"An exemplar of poetry as a verbal tool of ethnography....Truly impressive."
--Dell Hymes, University of Virginia"A graceful play of history, ethnography, and poetry that shows us the strange in the everyday and the familiar in the exotic."
--Miles Richardson, Louisiana State University"A skillful poetics of text-making builds context as certain and as powerfully as any classic ethnography, while yet being a virtuoso performance of all of those tendencies in the aftermath of the 1980s 'Writing Culture' critique that have come to define the preoccupations of anthropology."
--George Marcus, Rice University