Love Prodigal

Traci Brimhall

Forthcoming November 2024

Fiercely self-aware and “utterly present tense,” Traci Brimhall’s Love Prodigal lives in the messiness of starting over. As Brimhall grieves a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family trauma, and chronic illness appear. There is an urge to detach, to go numb. Yet, pain is always returned as a gift—the beautiful vulnerability of feeling. In conversation with Da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bachelard, images of the phoenix appear throughout the collection; its metaphor promises an easy and endless cycle of rebirth—a forever life, forever alone. Brimhall rejects this idea, instead reaching for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. 

Paperback: $17.00 list price

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ISBN: 9781556597022

Format: Paperback

Love Is

a patient, perhaps. As in wearing its gown,
gripping its belly and complaining about
its clumsy health, asking for its histories
to be kissed away. Love is kind of excited
to have a body sometimes, with its delicious
weaknesses—shivers, tiredness, the tastebuds
for macchiatos and Oreos. Love is a spring
storm coming to weep its petty joys all over
the bees in the graveyard. Love is a nest
of moonlight, by which I mean nothing
real but still something beautiful, seductive
as any good image. I feel sad about love
as I rub my own feet in the waiting room,
but maybe tomorrow it will come to boast,
its hope will churn through the cumulus noon,
lightning promising a flood of flames, grass
offering obedience to the fire. If it’s coming,
I can endure it with the patience of the rose
of Jericho. Even with morning’s slow rain
apologizing to the garden, love is a head on
my chest and the deep breath. It’s the museum
of confessions and shared sleeps. It is a body’s
quick amnesia, the pain barely a memory
after a pill. It glows like a hospital gown dipped
in luminol. It waits like the hand in your hand
for something to stir to life and squeeze.

About the Author

Known for her frequent marriage of the ordinary with the surreal, Traci Brimhall is the author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (2020); Saudade (2017); Our Lady of the Ruins (2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (2010), selected by Michelle Boisseau for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year Award. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, and she …

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Reviews

“An intense flow of loose-limbed, vividly imagined, and deeply felt poems. . . . Brimhall addresses life’s everyday suffering in astonishing language that will attract a wide range of readers. Highly recommended.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal, STARRED review

“Traci Brimhall’s fifth collection simmers. . . . These poems of mid-life renewal reverberate with the past, rewritten from a transformative new landscape. . . . Throughout, Brimhall builds ‘the truth of motherhood,’ a motherhood set realistically within illness, divorce, transformations. As these poems enthusiastically remind us, all of life continues to happen when mothering, including the passions, bodily and poetic, that thread a body of work, a personal history that moves toward freedom and power.”—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub

“Writes with daring and dazzling descriptions of intimacies real and surreal.”—Roberta E. Winter, New York Journal of Books

“At the heart of Traci Brimhall’s enchanting new collection is the image of the phoenix, the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes—resurrection, second chances. The aubade is a recurring form in Love Prodigal, a love poem signifying sun-up, lovers parting at dawn . . . [and] interestingly, the fleuron, or glyph, that signals the start of each new section of this book, is a rising sun. All of this points to Brimhall’s overarching vision of our (i.e., her) messy human lives.”—Charles Rammelkamp, Compulsive Reader