Traci Brimhall

"Poetry for the new century: awake to the world, spiritually profound, and radiant with lyric intelligence." —Carolyn Forché

"For a world that has to transform itself to endure, for a world that transforms itself constantly to no purpose, Traci Brimhall has written an elegy and a cradle song. Her poems are viscerally contemporary. But they have the authority of the foundational texts, spoken before there was a divide between myth and action. Haunted by cruelty and strangely reverential, these poems bring to mind Martin Buber's encounters with a "self-evident mystery" at a desolate point in history: "We make the forbidden visible/​when we fill thimbles on the windowsill/​with holy water." Our Lady of the Ruins is visionary writing. Brimhall is an important new poet." —D. Nurkse

“This is a book of devotions: to grief, survival, the ecstasy of hope, and the simultaneous loss and persistence of belief. As in Rookery, her first collection, Traci Brimhall’s new work is brutal and blisteringly beautiful. These are poems through which walk saints and assassins, prophets and pilgrims, and woman after woman whose only choice in the face of unrelenting damage is to trust that ‘[e]verything will come true—/​the flood, the famine, the miracle.’ Our Lady of the Ruins is dangerously alive.” —Tracy K. Smith

"Traci Brimhall's Our Lady of the Ruins invites us into a richly-textured landscape and the seekers and pilgrims who restlessly, relentlessly explore its darker reaches in search of meanings. It's as if a Tarot deck came alive and its characters told their stories in stark, imaginative narratives that made their world more real and urgent than the one we inhabit. This is visionary poetry sustained at the highest level—a book full of lucid dreams alive with menace and quest." —Gregory Orr

"Protean, commanding, visionary, Our Lady of the Ruins unfolds with a propulsive, prophetic intensity that rivets the reader from the first lines, where the poet invites us to envision a burning piano as an emblem of a epoch when 'half the world ends and the other half continues.' With a sweeping, investigative intelligence and intrepid imagination, the poet limns this gutted universe (the poems resemble tense fever-bulletins from an apocalypse) by enriching the poems with luminous and unnerving details ('a deer licking salt from a lynched man’s palm'). The poet’s piercing, imperative sense of this powerfully rendered dystopia is never merely abject or despairing, for Our Lady of the Ruins offers something more profound and mysterious than a hot jeremiad or a pressing gospel; it allows us to savor the beauty, ambiguity, and contradiction that keen-eyed poetry can yield. Carolyn Forché chose this fearlessly sibylline, panoramic work, in which violence and calm, cruelty and tenderness are alloyed, for the Barnard Women’s Prize, and rightly so: it a salient, worthy, and astonishing second book." —Cyrus Cassells

“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, from the panicking heartbeats of birds to the spiking pulse of mice.” —Dorianne Laux

“This emotionally articulate, intense debut gives us the myth of self in its various incarnations: elegiac, surreal, meditative, erotic, dreamlike. I love [Brimhall’s] luscious verbal texturing and lyric slipperiness, an assertive voice, a sensuality, a glow. A beautiful book.” —Ilya Kaminsky

“The poems in Traci Brimhall’s Rookery make beautiful the brutal as she casts an uncompromising eye on the vagaries of faith, the disappointments of the human heart—and the uneasy interstices between animal consciousness and ours. . . . Part incantation, part lamentation, the language in these poems is sensual and urgent.” —Claudia Emerson