Locomotive Cathedral: The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention
Autor Brandel France de Bravoen Limba Engleză Paperback – mar 2025
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496240088
ISBN-10: 1496240081
Pagini: 112
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Editura: The Backwaters Press
Colecția The Backwaters Press
Seria The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496240081
Pagini: 112
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Editura: The Backwaters Press
Colecția The Backwaters Press
Seria The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Brandel France de Bravo is the author of the poetry collections Provenance and Mother, Loose and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2024, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Diode, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.
Extras
Regard the Other as a Verb
I don’t eat crow. I feed crow.
My crow isn’t my crow.
I name the crow because
I’m human and want to know
how a god feels. When I use my app
to id a tree, I pronounce it
“Osage-orange.” I bask
in my beneficence. I’m the Pope
tossing blessings from a balcony.
The crowd pecks at them,
gobbles them up. I am not
so different from a pigeon.
What appears to be strutting
is gracelessness on earth.
René is perspicacious
and has only one foot. Strutting
is out of the question. If I stare
at my balcony long enough,
he will glide toward it, flat
as a black manta ray. He is
my lesson in looms large.
Every visit is a spell. The sun
has a brief brown-out,
and I turn a little electric.
Maybe the crow and I are
planets. He likes orbs: grapes
and blueberries. Sometimes
his eating and my reading align.
And then, he leaves. A lesson
in recede. I watch until he bends
around a building. I have
a special whistle to call him,
but he is not a dog. The dachshund
next door barks for hours
when my neighbor goes out.
René caws on my railing
for what seems like hours. This
is my lesson in forgiveness.
He caws for me, for food,
for me with food. For me
to count 1-2-3 and throw
kibble for him to catch.
Every time I’m with him
I have to reprimand myself:
“Want, use your indoor voice!”
I don’t eat crow. I feed crow.
My crow isn’t my crow.
I name the crow because
I’m human and want to know
how a god feels. When I use my app
to id a tree, I pronounce it
“Osage-orange.” I bask
in my beneficence. I’m the Pope
tossing blessings from a balcony.
The crowd pecks at them,
gobbles them up. I am not
so different from a pigeon.
What appears to be strutting
is gracelessness on earth.
René is perspicacious
and has only one foot. Strutting
is out of the question. If I stare
at my balcony long enough,
he will glide toward it, flat
as a black manta ray. He is
my lesson in looms large.
Every visit is a spell. The sun
has a brief brown-out,
and I turn a little electric.
Maybe the crow and I are
planets. He likes orbs: grapes
and blueberries. Sometimes
his eating and my reading align.
And then, he leaves. A lesson
in recede. I watch until he bends
around a building. I have
a special whistle to call him,
but he is not a dog. The dachshund
next door barks for hours
when my neighbor goes out.
René caws on my railing
for what seems like hours. This
is my lesson in forgiveness.
He caws for me, for food,
for me with food. For me
to count 1-2-3 and throw
kibble for him to catch.
Every time I’m with him
I have to reprimand myself:
“Want, use your indoor voice!”
Cuprins
Regard the Other as a Verb
Part 1. Take & Give
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
Resilience I
Free Trade Agreement, a Zuihitsu
Women Talking
Love It or List It
Staging
People of the Dog
Resilience II
Resilience III
You’re Like a Dull Knife
The Lounge Chair Does the Work
Taking Dictation
Home Improvement
Pronominal Affection
It’s a Joy to Be Hidden and a Disaster Not to Be Found
Fractals
Part 2. Mind Training Slogans
Slogan 27: Work with the Greatest Defilements First
Slogan 25: Don’t Talk about Injured Limbs
Slogan 7: Giving and Taking Should Be Practiced Alternately. These Two Should Ride the Breath (a.k.a. Practice Tonglen)
Slogan 34: Don’t Transfer the Ox’s Load to the Cow
Slogan 8: Three Objects, Three Poisons, Three Seeds of Virtue
Slogan 1: Train in the Preliminaries
Slogan 20: Of the Two Witnesses, Hold the Principal One
Slogan 38: Don’t Seek Others’ Pain as the Limbs of Your Own Happiness
Slogan 49: Always Meditate on Whatever Provokes Resentment
Slogan 59: Don’t Expect Applause
Slogan 4: Self-Liberate Even the Antidote
Slogan 28: Abandon All Hope of Fruition
Part 3. After the Before Times
Resilience IV
What It Took and What It Gave
Resilience V
Lying Flat
Seam and Sieve
Tradition Is the Prison in Which You Live
Provincetown
Angrief
Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do
If It’s in the Way, It Is the Way
Resilience VI
Part 4. Terminal Lucidity
Resurrection, a Cento from My Murdered Darlings
As Seen on TV
Guns and Butter
The Chemistry of Distance
Course Correction
Gold Chains and Squash Blossoms
Wind in a Box
Final Descent
Resilience VII
Acknowledgments
Notes
Part 1. Take & Give
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
Resilience I
Free Trade Agreement, a Zuihitsu
Women Talking
Love It or List It
Staging
People of the Dog
Resilience II
Resilience III
You’re Like a Dull Knife
The Lounge Chair Does the Work
Taking Dictation
Home Improvement
Pronominal Affection
It’s a Joy to Be Hidden and a Disaster Not to Be Found
Fractals
Part 2. Mind Training Slogans
Slogan 27: Work with the Greatest Defilements First
Slogan 25: Don’t Talk about Injured Limbs
Slogan 7: Giving and Taking Should Be Practiced Alternately. These Two Should Ride the Breath (a.k.a. Practice Tonglen)
Slogan 34: Don’t Transfer the Ox’s Load to the Cow
Slogan 8: Three Objects, Three Poisons, Three Seeds of Virtue
Slogan 1: Train in the Preliminaries
Slogan 20: Of the Two Witnesses, Hold the Principal One
Slogan 38: Don’t Seek Others’ Pain as the Limbs of Your Own Happiness
Slogan 49: Always Meditate on Whatever Provokes Resentment
Slogan 59: Don’t Expect Applause
Slogan 4: Self-Liberate Even the Antidote
Slogan 28: Abandon All Hope of Fruition
Part 3. After the Before Times
Resilience IV
What It Took and What It Gave
Resilience V
Lying Flat
Seam and Sieve
Tradition Is the Prison in Which You Live
Provincetown
Angrief
Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do
If It’s in the Way, It Is the Way
Resilience VI
Part 4. Terminal Lucidity
Resurrection, a Cento from My Murdered Darlings
As Seen on TV
Guns and Butter
The Chemistry of Distance
Course Correction
Gold Chains and Squash Blossoms
Wind in a Box
Final Descent
Resilience VII
Acknowledgments
Notes
Recenzii
“Kinetic and spectral, wise and suspicious of wisdom, Brandel France de Bravo’s Locomotive Cathedral chugs into an expansive, vaulted space, where ‘any raised surface can be an altar,’ via a hybrid text of poems, prose poems, and brief lyric essays. There is even a companion crow with one foot, René, who, like the speaker, is compelling and brilliant and makes no promises. Deft with figurative language—‘Like restaurant carp, we are learning to live in this aquarium,’—France de Bravo also questions the whole enterprise. ‘Metaphors can seem so transactional, language doing business, swapping currency,’ she writes, in a zuihitsu on giving and taking. Nothing here is undisputable, even the tools of the trade, and I love it. I love her parables breathing contemporary life into twelfth-century Tibetan Buddhist slogans on mind training—‘And then, there was the time I drove a dangerous highway, / thumb-drive buried in my bun . . . files and poems bobby-pinned / to my skull.’ I love the poems on flood and fire and plague, on dryer lint and home improvement, on the subject/object conundrum, on the woman, a mature, exhilarative presence, and on the one-legged crow, who has the first word, and the last.”—Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
“The muse of this collection is a one-legged crow, and crow it does, with an insinuating, insistent music and a wily, restless aesthetic that hops from brilliant image to sly aphorism to tender insight. These poems are luminously dark, keenly observant, and endlessly curious about the whole symphony of existence, where nothing is lost, everything is transformed, and we live our lives ‘not dying, but molting.’ Locomotive Cathedral is marked by its unflinching yet compassionate gaze; we are blessed to have it.”—Michael Bazzett, author of The Echo Chamber
“Brandel France de Bravo’s Locomotive Cathedral is a panoramic meditation ushering us into stillness. With grace and humility, in a skillful range of forms, France de Bravo sings a praise song to surrender. When living means ‘cycling through the stink and stain,’ France de Bravo celebrates the sacred pause, reminding us that ‘any raised surface can be an altar, a place to kneel.’”—Rage Hezekiah, author of Yearn
Descriere
With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self.