Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The transporting fourth book from Brimhall (Saudade) takes reader to a parallel world, a landscape that terrifies. In the Land of Nod, which she describes as "that biblical exile of Cain and the drifting space of dream in lullabies" and "a landscape made for a lifetime of lostness," the reader wanders through the pastoral delirium of sleepless infants, ancient sacrifices, and subverted fairy tales and fables. In alternating letters to Eros and Thanatos and in murder ballads and lullabies, Brimhall tells the story of a murdered friend, an event that coincides with the death of a mother and the speaker's anxieties toward her own new motherhood. Through these braided griefs, Brimhall brings an eye to the romance of death and the implications of conflating violence with beauty and eros. "An image wounds/ in the wrong location," she writes, "The horror of a carcass is the beauty/ of a butcher shop." Elsewhere, the speaker wonders if she is "guilty of this same need to make death lovely." Can death be understood through art? "God, God, what do I do/ after all this survival?" The questions posed by this stunning collection will remind readers of their own mortality, while reawakening the power and fury within them.
