Rookery

Rookery

by Traci Brimhall
Rookery

Rookery

by Traci Brimhall

eBook

$9.49  $10.99 Save 14% Current price is $9.49, Original price is $10.99. You Save 14%.

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers

LEND ME® See Details

Overview

Traveling to the most intimate extremes of the human heart

Fraught with madness, brutality, and ecstasy, Traci Brimhall’s Rookery delves into the darkest and most remote corners of the human experience. From the graveyards and battlefields of the Civil War to the ancient forests of Brazil, from desire to despair, landscapes both literal and emotional are traversed in this unforgettable collection of poems. Brimhall guides readers through ever-winding mazes of heartbreak and treachery, and the euphoric dreams of missionaries. The end of days, the intoxication of religion that at times borders on terror, and the post-evangelical experience intertwine with the haunting redemptions and metamorphoses found in violence. These tender yet ruthless poems, brimming with danger and longing, lure readers to “a place where everyone is transformed by suffering.”


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780809385799
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date: 10/21/2010
Series: Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 79
Sales rank: 578,941
File size: 435 KB

About the Author

Traci Brimhall, who received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, recently completed a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, FIELD, Southern Review, Indiana Review, and other journals.

Read an Excerpt

AUBADE WITH A BROKEN NECK

The first night you don't come home
summer rains shake the clematis.
I bury the dead moth I found in our bed,
scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough
with dirt. The dog finds me and presents
between his gentle teeth a twitching
nightjar. In her panic, she sings
in his mouth. He gives me her pain
like a gift, and I take it. I hear
the cries of her young, greedy with need,
expecting her return, but I don't let her go
until I get into the house. I read
the auspices-the way she flutters against
the wallpaper's moldy roses means
all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling
means a storm approaches. You should see
her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing
at the starless window, her body a dart,
her body the arrow of longing, aimed,
as all desperate things are, to crash
not into the object of desire,
but into the darkness behind it.


REGRET WITH WILDFLOWERS

So much can hide in a field. A prairie dog
can escape the hawk that devils it. A seed
can wait until it is ready to be broken open,
the earth ready to transform it. Today, aphids

ravage the wildflowers, bison graze in the pasture,
and I am returning home from another mistake.
Of all my minor regrets, this is the worst-
I let you assure me that desire is like a boy

who throws rocks at a deer decaying in the river.
That innocent. That brutal. I let you hold me down,
let you draw my blood to the surface of my skin

and call it an accident. But now I see how awful
the sky is. How stark. How bare. How, when clouds
expose the sun, horses tilt their heads with pleasure.


DISCIPLINE WITH LINES FROM FIRST CORINTHIANS

You try and teach me to be careful with my thoughts
or else, when the day comes, my ashes may not ascend
with the rest of the believers, but I can't help myself.

I'm shy and susceptible to voices stirring in the clock
at midnight whispering Listen, I tell you a mystery:
we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.


You say it is not the animal in us that loves to struggle,
but the spirit that wants to be locked in the crucible
of flesh until the soul burns clean. Mother, I beat my body

and make it my slave
. I see a snake swallow its tail and know
we are all infinite. Father, take me to the field where snow
is melting through the ribs of the deer it covered all winter.

There is a word inside every perishable thing aching
to be spoken so it may live again. I've heard it.
I found a bunting drowsing in the bushes, pinned back

its wings and listened to its indigo lullaby, its song
like last century's wind asking How can some of you say
there is no resurrection?
 How could any of us be damned?


COME BACK TO ME

If you go to the ruins, a man will sell you
the story of a queen for a kiss. This is the commerce
of beauty. His lips. Your imagination. A moment

of closed eyes and forgetting. He will tell you
it is good luck to take your husband and lay him
down on a tomb for a night, but when you say

you're alone, he insists that this is better-
to lay yourself down under a fire that has no heat
and pray to the Tunisian moon for a barren orchard

and an ocean without sharks. There is comfort
in a lie, but there is also a thief who will take you
unarmed in a dark town asking only for a kiss

and the money in your wallet. And you will
give it. Freely. Because a man asked for part of you,
and because you've been alone for so long

you've forgotten what a man tastes like.
Because it's your last night in Africa and twelve
dollars is not too much to lose. Because he says

Come back to me even as you are showing him
your breasts in the cemetery, and because, in truth,
you like the way the moonlight looks on his skin.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Prayer for Deeper Water

1. (n) A colony of rooks
Aubade with a Broken Neck
Aubade with a Fox and a Birthmark
Dueling Sonnets on the Railroad Tracks
Aubade in Which the Bats Tried to Warn Me
Aubade in Which I Untangle Her Hair
Oneiromancy
Aubade with a Panic of Hearts
Regret with Wildflowers
Concerning Cuttlefish and Ugolino
Appalachian Aubade
Restoration of the Saints
Noli Me Tangere
Requiem with Coal, Butterflies, and Terrible Angels

2. (n) A breeding place 
Fiat Lux
Elegy with Mosquitoes, Peppermints, and a Snapping Turtle
The Summer after They Crashed and Drowned
Discipline with Lines from First Corinthians
To the Tall Stranger Who Kept His Hands in His Pockets, Fourteen Years Later
The Bullet Collector
Chastity Belt Lesson
On a Mission Trip to Philadelphia I Begin to Fear the Inside of My Body
Missionary Child
Possession
Glossolalia
Why He Leaves
Echolalia, St. Armands Key
Leviathan: A Rapture
Through a Glass Darkly
Prayer for Sunlight and Hunger

3. (n) A crowded tenement house 
Ars Poetica
Nocturne with Clay Horses
Via Dolorosa
Falling (For the 146 . . . )
The Saints Go Marching
Battle Hymn
Falling (A twin-engined B-25 . . .)
At a Party on Ellis Island, Watching Fireworks
The Women Are Ordered to Clear the Bodies of Suitors Slain by Ulysses
Dressing Heads
Margaret Garner Explains It to Her Daughter
A Dead Woman Speaks to Her Resurrectionist
The Light in the Basement
Come Back to Me
American Pastoral
Kingdom Come
Nocturne with Oil Rigs and Jasmine
Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews