Traci Brimhall – författare

"[Brimhall] allows us brief visions, glimpses, of experiences more lush and raw than our own."—The Rumpus

"With a stunning mastery of metaphor, linguistic precision, and a soulful determined vision, Brimhall''s work reveals an artist tuned to the significance of everyday experience."—Dorianne Laux

"Saudade" is a Portuguese word referring to a quality of longing that has no direct translation into English. Inspired by stories from her Brazilian-born mother, Traci Brimhall''s third collection—a lush and startling "autobiomythography"—is reminiscent of the rich imaginative worlds of Latin American magical realists. Set in the Brazilian Amazon, Saudade is one part ghost story, one part revival, and is populated by a colorful cast of characters and a recurring chorus of irreverent Marias.

From "Incomplete Address to the Lord":

When I found that mass of scales and muscle,saw one anaconda twist around another, watcheda split tongue flick the air, choosing me, blackas the devil''s own and twice as thick, males coiledaround the female tickling her back with their spurs,I knew I''d give anything to be her. I felt the pulsein my eyelid, tasted the ants that paraded overmy plantains at night, drank all the darkness outof my wife''s breast. Lord, I''d rather be crazythan broken . . .

Traci Brimhall is the author of two previous poetry collections. She earned her PhD from Western Michigan University and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University. She lives in Manhattan, Kansas.

Amidst cycles of heartbreak, trauma, and chronic pain, Love Prodigal finds strength in the natural world, motherhood, desire, and new love.

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. When the body becomes a site the poet “cannot live in or leave,” she finds strength in the beauty of the natural world, in motherhood, in desire, in new love, in “a thousand small pleasures that made [her] want to live.” Told through various forms—aubades, a prose crown of sonnets, an admissions essay—Love Prodigal says yes to second (and third and fourth) chances. The heart gets bigger every time it heals.