Reconstructions
Bradley Trumpfheller
Reviewed by Vasantha Sambamurti
“Nothing worth saying stays still long enough to say it.” From the first line, Reconstructions announces its vibrance. Sharp, sophisticated, and effortlessly tender, Bradley Trumpfheller’s debut poetry collection palpably evokes sensations known to the scrutinized body: “Hips, clotted, / raw, unbuckled into boyhood.” Central to each sensation is a story, the fraught seed at the fruit’s center: lovers in the parking lot, “cousins slow-dancing in their cowboy boots & antlers,” navigating sexuality and gender in the American South, counting the things effaced and ornamented through heritage: “My aunts spell / around the vanity mirror / & centerpiece me, my lips plummed, / my neck belled mid-flight”. Each poem explores a chameleonic act of being: as daughter, child, lover, boy, other. In effecting a literal reconstruction of these roles, the speaker acknowledges the bloodwork they entail: “I’m trying I’m trying I’m trying I’m trying / to write a history of us / without writing a history of us / being harmed.” The language guides us through the process of learning, unlearning, and reinscribing the acts of every “good” body and “any good daughter.” Implicit in this: a song of personal reckoning and awareness: “I’ll be a girl & you can be anything alive.”
To live is to yearn. To be a body is to straddle belonging, wherever that belonging may be. Tensions between friction and desire throw the body into sharp relief: “my legs the body / at last a negative / of herself”. Reconstructions is an anatomical feat: severing and reattaching meaning to the flesh while rigorously envisioning its immunity.