Love prodigal

Brimhall follows up Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod with a deep plunge into the pain of love lost through divorce and the slow scramble to recovery. "He…said cold / said crazy said broken, like an owl donating a mouse's / bones to the barn floor," observes Brimhall in one of the numerous original and unexpected images she startles readers with as she examines the meaning of love, the weight of memory, and her sense of self. Refreshingly, Brimhall doesn't fall to rage or ranting but uses the occasion to examine how she's lived ("Am horny for self-awareness, / a slut for emotional work, and am still unsolved"), examining her flaws and her pain and refusing to take the easy way out ("God, I am tired of fetishizing resilience"). Eventually, "the pain of suffering warms into // the pain of healing" as she celebrates her son, seeks new love, and ruefully acknowledges the limits of a body growing older even as she copes with her mother's death. What results is an intense flow of loose-limbed, vividly imagined, and deeply felt poems. VERDICT Brimhall addresses life's everyday suffering in astonishing language that will attract a wide range of readers. Highly recommended.

LOVE PRODIGAL I make love when I am bored.  That's how I know I'm an intelligent  animal. It's easy to tremble--a pistil  brushed with a bumblebee's fur-- and who doesn't want to be golden,  like pearls of fat glistening in an artery  or a mother's first milk? I want  to send you photos of dead fledglings  on the sidewalk, those perils of the lavish  season, but we are wrong, a news story  tells me so, explaining beauty drives  evolution, not a mate with an advantageous  beak. I wish I could tell you this. Letters  and novels keep seducing me with  their fantasies of closure, but I like  the way your silence wastes inside me.  I am a grieving animal. Let's not pretend  souls are beautiful. They're as ugly  as white petals wilting, crisping  and curling in on themselves  in cloudy water and green-rot. But let  them fall into me like loose change  in a leg cast. What's broken cannot be  healed with anything but superglue  and imagination, but let it be tended to.  Let it be tender. Let's imagine a miracle  together at a distance, the reunion  of a pronoun and its first verb. I'm not  over it--the elk's blood blackens the bottom  of the fridge, and when I wipe it, it leaves  a pink quarter, blood-ghost, hunger stain  in the shape of your birthmark.  I'm a regretful animal. My heart tries  to grow as fast as velvet in May.  It's trying to attract an ending with  a crown of daisies, an archive  of spring, of wants, of waterfalls, of woods, good God, I know you  won't take me back. from  DIARY OF FIRES: A PROSE CROWN OF SONNETS SMOKE FORGES DUSK, ASH PLAGIARIZES SNOW. THE FIRST THREAT TO MEMORY IS THE TRUTH. I'm afraid I love like my mother, who told me on a heat-drunk walk that if I ever thought  anything bad about her she would kill herself. So I ran, the word daughter around my neck  like a collar.  In one of the oldest origin stories of the phoenix, the bird made its resurrection fire from  myrrh and its parent. The myrrh that burns was also the phoenix's cradle. I try and sing my mother's favorite hymns, and my lungs go flat as a catfish skull, my heart  knows its own color, the pink so hot it stains my hands like beets. A cosmic mauve perfumes  the hellebores--my ribs ache with her voice. My love and I talk about what we would do when one of us dies as I cut his hair, and he  says, At first I thought I couldn't live without you --I pause, take the guard off the razor-- but then I realized I'd be sad for a long time, and then I'd be fine . I brush bristled hair from his collar bones and cry; I've never felt this safe. It's the phoenix's loneliness I try to understand the most, how the myth promises renewal,  rebirth, but to live forever is to live alone. Fire doesn't even offer even the company of a  shadow. Before medical astrology lost its influence, people believed that to become a good physician  you must first be a good astronomer. My mother's blood slinks in me, a hibernating secret,  but some people see it and diagnose me as a fire sign. Recovering the exiled memory of her mother trying to die in front of her, the character  Meredith Grey cries, fictional but grieving better than me on a TV show. Only once?! I think,  suck it up, and before the darkness reveals itself, I sear the wound closed. Excerpted from Love Prodigal by Traci Brimhall All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.