Locomotive Cathedral

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.

“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

• Regard the Other as a VerbPart 1. Take & GiveAfter the Ecstasy, the LaundryResilience IFree Trade Agreement, a ZuihitsuWomen TalkingLove It or List ItStagingPeople of the DogResilience IIResilience IIIYou’re Like a Dull KnifeThe Lounge Chair Does the WorkTaking DictationHome ImprovementPronominal AffectionIt’s a Joy to Be Hidden and a Disaster Not to Be FoundFractalsPart 2. Mind Training SlogansSlogan 27: Work with the Greatest Defilements FirstSlogan 25: Don’t Talk about Injured LimbsSlogan 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 CowSlogan 8: Three Objects, Three Poisons, Three Seeds of VirtueSlogan 1: Train in the PreliminariesSlogan 20: Of the Two Witnesses, Hold the Principal OneSlogan 38: Don’t Seek Others’ Pain as the Limbs of Your Own HappinessSlogan 49: Always Meditate on Whatever Provokes ResentmentSlogan 59: Don’t Expect ApplauseSlogan 4: Self-Liberate Even the AntidoteSlogan 28: Abandon All Hope of FruitionPart 3. After the Before TimesResilience IVWhat It Took and What It GaveResilience VLying FlatSeam and SieveTradition Is the Prison in Which You LiveProvincetownAngriefNow You Don’t See It, Now You DoIf It’s in the Way, It Is the WayResilience VIPart 4. Terminal LucidityResurrection, a Cento from My Murdered DarlingsAs Seen on TVGuns and ButterThe Chemistry of DistanceCourse CorrectionGold Chains and Squash BlossomsWind in a BoxFinal DescentResilience VII AcknowledgmentsNotes