Our Lady of the Ruins

by Traci Brimhall

Winner of the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, Our Lady of the Ruins tracks a group of women through their pilgrimage in a mid-apocalyptic world. Exploring war, plagues, and the search for a new God in exile, these poems create a chorus of wanderers haunted by empire, God, and personal trauma.

Genres: Poetry, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Fiction

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2012

About the author

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), winner of the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award.

Reviews

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you crave for the conjunction of myth and poetry, then this a collection for you. New twists on modern myths come alive page after page. Christian, pagan new age, classical allusions - it is all here. And, still there the ever constant poetic themes of life, birth, death, dying, decaying, loving and sorrow. This is great, but I confess I got to read it over the course of a sleepy Friday at work. I went to Amazon to buy her earlier collection, and anticipate the next one.

[Daniel Grear · Rating 2 out of 5]

Because Traci Brimhall's apocalyptic world feels hazy and ill-defined, the logic of her poetry comes off as erratic, even clumsy at times. That said, she's still the best image-conjurer I've read.

[Greg Giannakis · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Dark and dystopian with piercingly profound turns of phrase. A poetry collection I stumbled across at a used bookstore years ago, and only just got to now. I had plans to go out this afternoon, but after reading the first poem, I crawled back into bed and read the whole thing in one go.

[Alexandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes poetry is not for me and I think that is the case here.

[Nicola · Rating 3 out of 5]

So hard to read on the heels of Li-Young Lee. Where he says so much with so little, I found that this collection said so little with so much--but that is too harsh. There are some INCREDIBLE images and ideas here and an authority in tone and execution that I greatly admire. Loved the opening line that many have pointed to: "Imagine half the world ends and half the world continues." Love the poem title: "A Year Between Wars." Love the threatening, apocalyptic atmosphere and the speaker's knowledge of troubled knowledge, as well as the creation of strange, half-understood symbols and images. Love and understand why for different reasons the amazing poets Carolyn Forche, Saskia Hamilton, Gregory Orr, and Tracy K. Smith all endorse this book. So much to love here. Really. But I also found many throwaway lines that were perhaps more powerful to others. For example, I found too many lines like this: "Love is the baker selling bread to the hangman." I don't find this image very exciting: yes, life and death are juxtaposed, this is a world where people are professions are in the midst of a fallen hierarchy (apocalypse, ahem), ok, ok, I get it. Perhaps, it was a problem for me of quantity. Style-wise, I grew tired of the stacking of the above, shall we say, social images, as well as the stacking of brutal images and imperatives. I grew tired of the gaudiness of many of the images, like this overwrought one (which others are sure to love): "deer licking salt from a lynched man's palm." At a different stage in my life, I would have eaten these poems up with a pitchfork. Makes me want to reread other works that recall this one--Matthea Harvey's "Modern Life" and Djuna Barnes' "Nightwood" come straight to mind--and see if I would have a similar reaction to them or still find them brilliant and their gaudiness of interest. Last word: Brimhall is definitely a very talented poet, one to keep track of.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good god, Traci's language and her arresting images make this book one of the best I've read this semester! In the poems, a group of women are wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape searching for salvation, and they find it among the ruins and carnage of their fallen civilization . Traci does an incredible job of stringing devastating images together to form a general feeling of insurmountable loss, and her carefully chosen abstractions, which usually hurt a poem, only added to their depth. It doesn't surprise me that Carolyn Forche wrote the forward to this book, because, at her best, Traci reminds me of Forche's Salvador poems in "The Country Between Us". Completely worth the read!

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable set of poems that moves more like a novel than a collection, its characters situated in a post-apocalyptic world of longing, exile, and unsturdy faith. Brimhall's language is just stunning, line to line: the precision of her images, the pacing, the leaps—all of it. (Also, perhaps because it was the last, I believe, post-apocalyptic novel I've read, I kept experiencing these poems as a kind of soundtrack to Gold, Fame, Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins.)

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of images that stay with you. "Imagine a piano lit on fire and pushed off a roof." In this collection the world becomes a battleground. I loved the line, "the coroner found minnows swimming on a drowned girl's lungs." This book is unforgettable and haunting in the best way possible. I couldn't look away.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So in love with this book's lush language, surprising imagery and satisfyingly bizarre conflations of post-apocalypic worldview and religious rhetoric. Syntactically compact and quiet, I'm amazed at how Brimhall packs in so much decay, death, and radical change into a book that feels so precise in its articulation.

[Felix · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read her work, I am praying.

[Yasmeen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This brilliant collection requires depth to read but beautiful, well-crafted and creative.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for school and greatly enjoyed it! Parts were gibberish, but it was wonderful to read.

[Redbearreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess I’m a poetry gurl now

[Jessie (Zombie_likes_cake) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, I won't even attempt to pretend to understand everything that is going on in here. BUT: the imagery!! THE IMAGERY! I don't think I've ever read a poetry collection this cinematic, it reads like a post-apocalyptic movie, or a painting. Like a post-apocalyptic movie-painting. I don't even know but it was fantastic.

All of these poems are set in the same world and we loosely follow a group of women trying to survive. It reads like a lucid dream of this destroyed, futuristic landscapes. It is brutal. Things are hazy and clear at the same time, poetic and disturbing. Hope next to terror. There are themes of war and trauma, devastation and destruction, death and birth. But it's also about faith: losing it, finding it anew, clinging to old Gods or shaping new religions and believes out of these ruins. It's not a religious collection but it is about religious ideas and concepts, especially in a world that has lost so much, and as an atheist that is much more appealing, even quite interesting to me.

And now let me share a ton of quotes because that's what this is all about anyway. Read this poetry book if you want to experience the apocalypse.

"Each week we build a new god and take yesterday's god to the sea."

"This is their rapture, not yours.
You are the doubter and doubt,
worshipping a book you can't read."

"From one broken country to another.
You know your way by the wreckage,
by torches and dust, by the watermark
on walls where the floods reached to touch
the fading portraits. Ghosts refuse
to abandon the ruins. They deliver no message
but the past."

"If you go deep enough you will recognize the dead
by their sins. Hornets and forsaken children attend them.
Be careful. Your heart will testify against yourself."

"Yesterday I cleaned the bones out of the boat
and met a child on shore. He made a gun
out of his hand. No one taught him this.
The boy told me I could keep
the boat. The bones were his."

"We can't remember sleeping, but we remember
our dreams. The shepherd of lesser gods tells us
bread is still mistaken for a missing body,
and a missing body is still mistaken for a miracle."

My favorites (but you need to read this as a whole, this book is literally and figuratively a journey): A Year Between Wars/ Diaspora/ How to Read a Compass/ Gnostic Fugue/ Hysteria: A Requiem/ How to Find the Underworld/ Late Novena/ Envoi/ The Orchard of Infinite Pears/ The Shepherd of Lesser Gods/ Sans Terre

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Until I read this, I did not know horror poetry was a thing. I'm not really glad to know it now, since I avoid horror in all formats. It's well executed but not my cup of tea.

This is supposed to be about a group of women in a post-apocalyptic environment, but the speakers of the poems weren't individualized enough to seem like a group; it all just seemed like one voice. That's not really a criticism unless the book was trying to do something else.

[Rebecca Valley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful language & image & story. I think the only thing that would have moved this from 4 to 5 stars for me is ditching the titles and committing to this as one long poem - that’s how I read it, and I think it suits the myth that lives beneath these poems.

[Remy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything will come true — / the flood, the famine, the miracle.

I want to eat this book and yet I can't help but feel that if I were to try, it would be nothing but ash and bones in my mouth. But still. Damn lovely bones. This was on Florence Welch's (of Florence + the Machine fame) reading list for the band's 2022 album Dance Fever. That, of course, sets some pretty high expectations all on its own. And I loved every word of this.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a startling and bold poetry collection about apocalypse, faith, and the female body. The language is evocative and colorful, and the stanzas bring up a progression of the world's decay.

[Gail Giewont · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book ages ago, but it never seemed like the right time to read it. I could not be more glad that I decided to start reading it yesterday.

It is highly unusual that I read a book of poems from beginning to end, but I could not seem to put this one down. While I have a soft spot for apocalyptic poetry, I'm not generally someone who enjoys a book of poems so reliant on one theme (in this case, women on a pilgrimage during some kind of armageddon).

This book is an exception to my usual distaste for poems trying to produce their own narrative. It is phenomenal.

Brimhall writes with remarkable clarity and invention. I would almost categorize her work as magical realism; so much of the imagery is technically impossible but emotionally correct. For me, an excellent poem is one that can surprise and move me. This book had a surprise in every poem. I love it so much.

[Cyrus · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

“We know the journey to God is a fatal one.
It isn’t even God we’re looking for.

We want to ride the horse of the past backward
through time to first wounds, laughter and milk,
but instead we drink from the beginnings of rivers.”

[Chelsea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our Lady of the Ruins addresses the deep, dark ideas and images of apocalyptic fiction, and I think that's why I still loved it despite some of my objections to the format.

The comparison Brimhall makes between religion and human disparity is fantastic. Humans inherently seek out belief in some overarching theory, and she captures the essence of that need perfectly with heavy Biblical metaphors and parables.

Her writing in general flows and just plain sounds good when read aloud despite the morbid undertones of cannibalism, sickness, and death (even before birth--the section focusing on stillbirths was particularly striking).

Overall, amazing poetry. The only reason it doesn't get five stars is that the constant two or three line stanzas started getting on my nerves, and the weird indentation in some of them didn't make sense and distracted from the poetry itself. If I hadn't been stuck in her writing and her world, the style repetition might have been a major turn off.

(Also, at the end of the book I was pleasantly surprised to see she lives in Kalamazoo and is getting her Doctorate at WMU. Yeah, Southwestern Michigan writers!)

[Joseph Dante · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely stunning book of poetry. An achievement. A book full of writing that will probably go on to be poorly emulated by other writers.

Using the language of myth and fantastical imagery, Brimhall creates spiritual and apocalyptic landscapes that evoke a sense of timeless yearning and struggle. Here, wonder and horror turn out to be sisters. The images she conjures are terrible in the best sense; they refuse to leave. I cannot recommend this collection enough. The poem, "To My Unborn Daughter," is worth the price of admission alone. I will follow Brimhall to the end of this darkened, doomed earth.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about an apocalyptical world and the women who are trying to survive it. An interesting concept but I had a hard time getting into these poems or identifying with them. Beautiful language but I felt distanced from the poems.

from Prelude to a Revolution: "They ask if it's true, / if slaves are chained together on ships to prevent suicide. // We say they'll never be free."

from Prayer to the Deaf Madonna: "Once, I was a mystery unto myself, / but desire and hunger taught me / about my body."

from Pilgrimage: "Signs on the trees say it is forbidden / to take your life in the woods, / but people sway from branches, // swords rust between their ribs."

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brimhall's poems are works of art-- shocking, emotionally disruptive, achingly beautiful, with imagery that is striking. However, she seems to write almost every piece in this collection somewhat formulaically, as if she has a studied poetic "recipe" she's following. Moreover, she relies, in my opinion, too heavily on surrealism, which has the effect of holding her readers aloof, at arm's length; the often cryptic style reflects, I think, the poet's fear of connecting in a concrete way with her content and/or with what she ultimately wants and needs to convey.

[Mary Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Every time Brimhall writes one good line she follows it up with twelve lines of obtuse nonsense. She's working in traditions of post-Christian religious confusion but also in confusion about female trauma in the philosophical space, so if that appeals to you then you might like it more than I did. I feel like this was written to work through some of her own issues which, you know, respect, but I don't know why the reader is along for the ride.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bitter and imaginative and full of fantastic imagery. It's one of those poetry collections I connect to on an intellectual rather than an emotional level, however. The sense of dislocation is almost too successful, which makes it challenging to follow along and feel towards - but then I like challenging reads, so...

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visionary, luminous, gut wrenching, searingly honest--a book that searches for the best traits of humanity while paying witness to the seedy underbelly of our darkest capabilities. Brimhall will leave your jaw on the floor page after page.

[Kevin Langton · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's so good it's overwhelming. I just finished slowly reading it for the second or fifth time. The images are startling and surprising, and the language is the perfect vehicle. I don't read stuff I absolutely love that often, but this I absolutely love.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

i sooo want to love this book. i never got my bearings entirely, though, and the sense of dislocation threw me out of the poems rather than deeper in. might reread and see if it strikes me differently another time.

[Tory Adkisson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific lyric sequence that melds the sacred and the profane, and gives it a feminist twist. Never have I been so intrigued by poems exploring a post-apocalyptic landscape!