Love Prodigal
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Love, divorce, illness, and grief are at the center of Brimhall's expansive and moving fifth collection (after Come the Slumberless to the land of Nod). The title poem is among the book's most evocative, framing love as something that, like the prodigal son, departs, endures hardship, and returns—sometimes changed, sometimes forgiven. At their best, Brimhall's poems balance humor and grief, as in "Will & Testament": "Bury me with one of your shirts/ in case I come back as a bloodhound. Save my favorite panties—/ the pink ones—for a sexier immortality or a lonely evening." Similarly, "Body, Remember," inspired by Cavafy, meditates on memory's impermanence: "And over legs you endlessly shaved, grasses will grow like you—eager, wild, surviving every day they can." Though the collection's fire motif is persuasive in individual poems, it becomes overextended as the phoenix mythology collides with biblical references, diminishing its effect rather than deepening it. "Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Sonnets" strains to braid fragmented lyricism and philosophical asides, sometimes feeling forced rather than revelatory. Despite these excesses, Brimhall remains a master of list-making, anaphora, and imagery. It adds up to a striking, if uneven, collection.
