Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
Traci Brimhall
Reviewed by Madeline Vardell
“Soul, you raw little pea, there’s nowhere / left to hide” warns Traci Brimhall and, in the pages of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod, this warning couldn’t be sharper. Her poetry conjures trauma and turmoil from ancient mythology to the present day, mixing the imagined and real world on her journey to survive, to Nod, to forgiveness. Brimhall’s style is part brutal directness and liquid elegance as she confronts many deaths, actual and dreamed-up, in her series of poems titled “Dear Thantos.” In her alternating series, she apostrophizes Eros balancing the bile with honey and setting a match between the gods. The stakes tower and her readers become bystanders to the dissolving of her marriage, the murder of her dear friend, and the imagined death of her son—to what was and what might come. “Maybe if I imagine the worst one more time I will find / the scenario that saves my life . . .” wishes one poem, capturing the obsessive logic of the collection that drives us through Brimhall’s Hades and her lusty sea and breathes hope onto the page with the subjunctive maybe if . . .
And maybe it’s her frank revelations (her permissions!) that sustain us: “It’s alright / if you fall out of love with being alive,” or maybe it’s the slick of her rhyme: “Not, I’ll not kiss your lionlimb, not lap back the rattle in my ribs / like a lone pill going to powder // in an orange plastic bottle.” Whatever there’s to find, prepare to be bewitched until the journey ends at the approach of lightness and hope.