Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod - Softcover

Brimhall, Traci

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556595808 ISBN 13: 9781556595806

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2020

Synopsis

Written during the trial for a close friend’s murder, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod exposes that the whimsical, horrible, and absurd all sit together. In this ambitious fourth collection, Traci Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and death within herself as she lives through a series of impossibilities: the sentencing of her friend’s murderers, the birth of her child, the death of her mother, divorce, a trip sailing through the Arctic. In lullaby, lyric essay, and always with brutal sincerity, Brimhall examines how beauty and terror live right alongside each other––much like how Nod is both a fictional dreamscape and the place where Cain is exiled for murdering Abel. By plucking at the tensions between life and death, love and hate, truth and obscurity, Brimhall finds what it is that ties opposing themes together; how love and loss are married in grief. Like Eve thrust from Eden, Brimhall is tasked with finding meaning in a world defined by its cruelty. Unrelenting, incisive, and tender, these poems expose beauty in the grotesque and argue that the effort to be good always outweighs the desire to succumb to what is easy.

About this title

About the Author

Traci Brimhall has written four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod; Saudade; Our Lady of the Ruins, which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, and PBS Newshour.  She has received fellowships from the Breadloaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Arctic Circle Residency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds degrees from Florida State University (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA), and Western Michigan University (PhD), and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Fledgling
I scare away rabbits stripping the strawberries in the garden, ripened ovaries reddening their mouths. You take down the hanging basket and show it to our son―a nest, secret as a heart, throbbing between flowers. Look, but don’t touch, you instruct our son, who has already begun to reach for the black globes of a new bird’s eyes, wanting to touch the world. To know it. Disappointed, you say: Common house finch, as if even banal miracles aren’t still pink and blind and heaving with life. When the cat your ex-wife gave you died, I was grateful. I’d never seen a man grieve like that for an animal. I held you like a victory, embarrassed and relieved that this was how you loved. To the bone of you. To the meat. And we want the stricken pleasure of intimacy, so we risk it. We do. Every day we take down the basket and prove it to our son. Just look at its rawness, its tenderness, it’s almost flying.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556595808
• ISBN 13: 9781556595806
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 78