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REVIEWS:
"part Dylan Thomas, part saint's legend and part Tolkien." Our Lady of the Ruins reviewed at Publishers Weekly. "This book adds to the canon at the core of the Church of Poetry." Tracy K. Smith discusses Rookery on the Best American Poetry Blog "[Brimhall] allows us brief visions, glimpses, of experiences more lush and raw than our own, but then retracts them, and it is this retraction that makes the poems sting and sing."
Nick Lantz discusses Rookery on The Rumpus "In Rookery, Traci Brimhall’s poems dart deep into the canyons of the soul and emerge on the other side, bruised, but indomitable." Sandra Beasley reviews Rookery at Blackbird "The world of Brimhall's impressive first book is populated with terrifying angels, creatures beautiful and barbaric." Review of Rookery in the Plain Dealer (Reprinted in The Week) "With a voice that demands attention, and images that linger in the mind long after the book has been put down, Traci Brimhall is a writer to return to again and again." Review of Rookery by Dawn Manning in Buried Letter Press INTERVIEWS Discussion of Our Lady of the Ruins on One World Cafe Discussion of Our Lady, book break ups and failure on Blood-Jet Writing Hour |
Works
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010
“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 
(W.W. Norton, forthcoming)
"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 |
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