Traci Brimhall (Fiction, Poetry) | Manhattan, KS
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http://www.tracibrimhall.com/contact.htm |
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http://www.tracibrimhall.com |
Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award; and Saudade (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press). She also has a children’s book, Sophia & The Boy Who Fell, forthcoming from Pleiades Press/Seed Star Books. Some of her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. Recent essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, Image, and Brevity. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University and lives in Manhattan, KS.
Books (Poetry)
Books (Fiction)
Blurbs, Press & Reviews
“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
