Set in the 90s, alternating between the storied quads of Oxford University and the dank recesses of London pubs given over to public displays of queer BDSM, Learned chronicles poet and Rhodes Scholar Carellin Brooks' extreme explorations of mind and body. In these poems, the speaker trembles on the verge of discovery, pushing her physical limits through practices of pain, permission, and pleasure. But her inability to negotiate the unspoken elite codes of Oxford begs the question: how to unlearn a legacy of family dissolution and abuse? Bold, nuanced, and ultimately triumphant Learned chronicles an intimate education in flesh, desire, and bodily memory.

Carellin Brooks' earliest childhood memory of Wreck Beach is mostly of the arduous trek of four hundred odd steps that lead down to the beach. An inquisitive and adventurous 18–year–old, she later undertook the mission to find Wreck Beach but success eluded her: she walked around the point from Spanish Banks, getting as far as Tower Beach. Discovering and exploring what she now considers to be the best nude beach in the world would have to wait.

But not for too long. Upon returning from England where she completed a Master of Studies degree in English, she rediscovered what it was that had intrigued her about the beach in the first place: the unbridled idealism nestled within its natural beauty. Wreck Beach is one of Vancouver's least commercialized beaches, where concession stands, manmade swimimng pools and toilets with plumbing are nothing more than myths. It is this fantastic purity that continues to fascinate her, she says. The first time Brooks shed her clothes and swam in the nude, she recalls, was a "mystical experience. The day was perfect, sunny, glowing. It was heaven." Going to the beach is a respite from the fast–paced, commercial lifestyle that's packaged and sold to us daily. Lying in the hot sun, cooling off in the refreshing ocean, reliving the utopian moment of serenity, celebrating the landscape: these are only some of the experiences that she says whisk one's soul away from the chaos of city life.

Even so, she considers herself representative of the average beachgoer. Although Brooks is a great supporter of the work done by the Wreck Beach Preservation Society, her love affair with the beach is one that's highly personal, and not so much ideological. She visits the beach as often as time permits, simply to enjoy. Her favourite spot is the main beach because access to the ocean for swimming is best.

What else remains to be added to the Wreck Beach experience for Brooks? Now that Wreck Beach the book is complete, and she's attended the annual Polar Bear swim on New Year's Day, she has a new goal: to visit the beach each month of the year.

Carellin Brooks' profile page

• Nominated, ReLit Award for Poetry

"An exuberant Blakean song–of experience and innocence, of body and mind. With a wry wit, Brooks evokes a unique education—Oxford by day, London by night—and hard-won enlightenment." —Brett Josef Grubisic, author of My Two-Faced Luck

“These poems are snapshots of a student changing dress for gown as she earns respect in a world for whom children and women have little currency apart from honours attached to the lucky who seize the box and lift themselves out of invisibility.” —The British Columbia Review

"Brooks writes with clear forward-looking eyes about how she reclaimed her command of her body after sexual violation and abuse. Her lines are chiselled, ragged and disorienting, evoking the intensity of her transformation as she plays with the limits and uses of bearable pain, which overlap here with the bounds of memory. The balm of this book is Brooks makes no attempt to put her learning in a box or to label it as complete or virtuous—the meaning is here for us lucky readers to turn over, inspect, and glean from the dark glimmers and glorious bruises of her story.” —Alex Leslie, author of Vancouver for Beginners and We All Need to Eat

“Carellin Brooks traces her bumpy path to coming of age, intellectually and sexually, in this provocative, sharply observed and often funny debut collection.” —The Toronto Star

“Unabashed, funny, inventive, touching and self-questioning, the poems delight as a paean to the unique glory of brash, dumbfounding youth.” —Vancouver Sun

“Carellin Brooks traces her bumpy path to coming of age, intellectually and sexually, in this provocative, sharply observed and often funny debut collection.” —The Toronto Star

"An exuberant Blakean song–of experience and innocence, of body and mind. With a wry wit, Brooks evokes a unique education—Oxford by day, London by night—and hard-won enlightenment." —Brett Josef Grubisic, author of My Two-Faced Luck

"The poems in Learned feel like an underbelly, and they feel like the knife tip, and they feel like the cut—a chorus of identities, held precariously in one fierce speaker coming undone and becoming something new. Carellin Brooks' poetry is the raw, chaotic interior of a heart pouring out through a speaker who invites you under her skin just to understand what she is. Vulnerable and determined, Learned is an invitation you won't want to turn down, for a journey that will never leave you." —Nic Brewer, author of Suture

"The poems in Learned feel like an underbelly, and they feel like the knife tip, and they feel like the cut—a chorus of identities, held precariously in one fierce speaker coming undone and becoming something new. Carellin Brooks' poetry is the raw, chaotic interior of a heart pouring out through a speaker who invites you under her skin just to understand what she is. Vulnerable and determined, Learned is an invitation you won't want to turn down, for a journey that will never leave you." —Nic Brewer, author of Suture

“These poems are snapshots of a student changing dress for gown as she earns respect in a world for whom children and women have little currency apart from honours attached to the lucky who seize the box and lift themselves out of invisibility.” —The British Columbia Review

"Brooks writes with clear forward-looking eyes about how she reclaimed her command of her body after sexual violation and abuse. Her lines are chiselled, ragged and disorienting, evoking the intensity of her transformation as she plays with the limits and uses of bearable pain, which overlap here with the bounds of memory. The balm of this book is Brooks makes no attempt to put her learning in a box or to label it as complete or virtuous—the meaning is here for us lucky readers to turn over, inspect, and glean from the dark glimmers and glorious bruises of her story.” —Alex Leslie, author of Vancouver for Beginners and We All Need to Eat

"Part dream or fantasy, part role play, these are half-remembered poems from a disappearing life, a hushed ego trying to recall its origins. They function like a hole in a public stall, a peep show, allowing only glimpses of the speaker's sexual education. She records her younger self navigating that illicit grey zone between pleasure and pain, permission and complicity, and control as a tool for release, perhaps to remake how she understands the history of her body, and what others have done and can now do with it. Playful, sometimes frightening, always beguiling poems, from a writer I greatly admire." —Michael V. Smith, author of Bad Ideas

“These poems are snapshots of a student changing dress for gown as she earns respect in a world for whom children and women have little currency apart from honours attached to the lucky who seize the box and lift themselves out of invisibility.” —The British Columbia Review

"Part dream or fantasy, part role play, these are half-remembered poems from a disappearing life, a hushed ego trying to recall its origins. They function like a hole in a public stall, a peep show, allowing only glimpses of the speaker's sexual education. She records her younger self navigating that illicit grey zone between pleasure and pain, permission and complicity, and control as a tool for release, perhaps to remake how she understands the history of her body, and what others have done and can now do with it. Playful, sometimes frightening, always beguiling poems, from a writer I greatly admire." —Michael V. Smith, author of Bad Ideas