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These Threads Who Lead to Bramble: Essays
Russell Persson’s These Threads Who Lead to Bramble defies the singularity of any one genre as it braids together memory and myth to challenge the limits of our collective imagination
This is a book that contains multitudes—a celebration of the forgotten marginalia of Westernized thought. Persson’s collection delves into eccentric twentieth-century American photographers, the lives of his ancestors both distant and recent, and of the artist Egon Schiele in prison, teetering on the edge of sanity. He interweaves the careers of three obscure composers—Alban Berg, Erik Satie, and Anton Webern—and imagines the composer’s life based on listening to their music, rather than the other way around. And he charts the path of his own life from a long-ago teenage road trip, sleeping in the backs of friends’ cars and trying to find himself inside a vast world.
As the work builds, the lines between personal memory and collective history become ever more abstract, blending inner and outer spheres to confront the unknowable expanse of universal existence. A must-read for fans of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.
This work includes black-and-white reproductions of Egon Schiele’s drawings, with permission from The ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna.
This is a book that contains multitudes—a celebration of the forgotten marginalia of Westernized thought. Persson’s collection delves into eccentric twentieth-century American photographers, the lives of his ancestors both distant and recent, and of the artist Egon Schiele in prison, teetering on the edge of sanity. He interweaves the careers of three obscure composers—Alban Berg, Erik Satie, and Anton Webern—and imagines the composer’s life based on listening to their music, rather than the other way around. And he charts the path of his own life from a long-ago teenage road trip, sleeping in the backs of friends’ cars and trying to find himself inside a vast world.
As the work builds, the lines between personal memory and collective history become ever more abstract, blending inner and outer spheres to confront the unknowable expanse of universal existence. A must-read for fans of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.
This work includes black-and-white reproductions of Egon Schiele’s drawings, with permission from The ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna.
146 pages, Paperback
Published February 18, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 30, 2026
2.5 ⭐️ / 5 ⭐️
I will admit I am still breaking into essays, poetry, and the like and I feel as if this inexperience may have played a role in my initial thoughts. There were pieces in this collection, such as the “History of American Road Trips” and “The Book of Mark” that I found profound and fascinatingly written. Although, there were large chunks of the collection that did not land with me. In the end, I may have to revisit at some point in the future.
I will say this, the title “These Threads that Lead to Bramble” is an amazing title!
I will admit I am still breaking into essays, poetry, and the like and I feel as if this inexperience may have played a role in my initial thoughts. There were pieces in this collection, such as the “History of American Road Trips” and “The Book of Mark” that I found profound and fascinatingly written. Although, there were large chunks of the collection that did not land with me. In the end, I may have to revisit at some point in the future.
I will say this, the title “These Threads that Lead to Bramble” is an amazing title!
March 1, 2025
I trust the motion of the planet the loops we mindless make around the sun the stars in night the pinpricks in the sheet above us.
I’ve seen the sea and I know what the clouds do when they come down to the sea. And I’ve small-towned it in between. The laden land. Who I stretch to come into grips with. Believing what I need and then what I come to. My sand is an island I’ve already said.
It turns out genealogy is not so much a tree as it is the present record of an aspen colony. If we are each or were at one time the rhizome who when traced back would find that early roots before us are now fled.
Our brains not particularly liking discord prefers the harmony of words put together by recipe subject verb agreement punctuation imagery recognizable universally will stumble. Reading this is a treat. I wrote that sentence easily, taking out the punctuation it needed, and once changing the tense to jazz it up a little. That is the gift of a book like this interrupting the normal flow of sentences in the brain and creating poetry in the brain of the brain for the brain from the brain. I loved it. I am awful at it but it is fun to see what the brain freed of constraints will cook up and serve. Mine is nonsense or just a lil poetry but the books has themes ideas and imagery that well cooks and riffs. Soars and triples as it is going and remains in echoes during the drive and the walk while working and cooking and sitting and dreaming. Definitely read this.
What’s recalled returns by chance. Stirred not by some desire to remember but by the taste of mint in the back of your throat or by a slanted light through amber curtains or passing the briefest scent of soap or lotion or by the shape a trail of smoke who rises from a cigarette describes or by the sound a single-engine airplane makes or what’s recalled is vivid again by the shift in tone of voice or by the quaver or stirred again by the way a garment hangs or by some unnoticed trip like so many occasions trivial and gone but for a note awaken some bloom who puts together pieces of an older record. There is a name for the history of the lives of saints but there is no name for the sudden chaff we suppose and bear.
I got off the train and through some thick pond who now lived around me I went slowly and with no sound only notes muffled by this us we found I went to the curb and stood there in the sunlight. I soaked in what I could. I soaked in what the silence told me, how the new quiet of this big city was constructed of a union urgent by the rules of better chance. The sun was there and laid itself down on me standing at a loss inside the stillness at a loss inside the loss I knew I’d signed. The tearing away in truth what was then a gathering. Sun and stillness and the loss of what then was of course undefined. She flew back to the plains and I stood sunned and quiet with some new chart to go on with no chart in hand.
In early evening the wooded gullies of Missouri gave way to the shapes and flats of what we’d come to know as something Western. With Kansas up above us we crossed into Oklahoma and we drove. The land itself the marker for where we arrived and where we’d left. I learned how state lines are decided not so much by rivers or old clan border but are instead decided by the color and the shape and the texture of the land. How Missouri changes from Missouri into Oklahoma in the palette and the topography and the geology as New Mexico is the etched basin below the elevated floor of the Texas panhandle.
the light when the sun has gone down but there is still the red and orange glow in the sky and there are no shadows and the wind has died down and it is not yet as cold as it will get tonight and all the colors of you and where you are and what’s behind you near you are all at their most vivid and alive the colors are the skeleton of these brief moments called up in memory and sustained there.
The final notes are something of a dwindle, the music of it unmoored and underway and becoming more distant and less defined as a face becomes a different face in the almost true dark and there is only the smallest angle of light up along the visage and it turns from one into another and it’s only guessed what mood is carried and before the shape is well sussed a scattering comes and the low almost inaudible notes blow off the bow to die off on each a several and small path.
Jack Gilbert called it the angel lost in our bodies. The music that thinking is. What each of them who face each other have in common among how several they are. The mad poet Ezra Pound and the near dead father. The dancer Hugh Laing and opposite him at the end of a row of beds in a southern madhome a thin man is checked by a belt who runs from his bedframe to his wrist. Where would you be to put your ear up against any of this? What would the sound be?
I’ve seen the sea and I know what the clouds do when they come down to the sea. And I’ve small-towned it in between. The laden land. Who I stretch to come into grips with. Believing what I need and then what I come to. My sand is an island I’ve already said.
It turns out genealogy is not so much a tree as it is the present record of an aspen colony. If we are each or were at one time the rhizome who when traced back would find that early roots before us are now fled.
Our brains not particularly liking discord prefers the harmony of words put together by recipe subject verb agreement punctuation imagery recognizable universally will stumble. Reading this is a treat. I wrote that sentence easily, taking out the punctuation it needed, and once changing the tense to jazz it up a little. That is the gift of a book like this interrupting the normal flow of sentences in the brain and creating poetry in the brain of the brain for the brain from the brain. I loved it. I am awful at it but it is fun to see what the brain freed of constraints will cook up and serve. Mine is nonsense or just a lil poetry but the books has themes ideas and imagery that well cooks and riffs. Soars and triples as it is going and remains in echoes during the drive and the walk while working and cooking and sitting and dreaming. Definitely read this.
What’s recalled returns by chance. Stirred not by some desire to remember but by the taste of mint in the back of your throat or by a slanted light through amber curtains or passing the briefest scent of soap or lotion or by the shape a trail of smoke who rises from a cigarette describes or by the sound a single-engine airplane makes or what’s recalled is vivid again by the shift in tone of voice or by the quaver or stirred again by the way a garment hangs or by some unnoticed trip like so many occasions trivial and gone but for a note awaken some bloom who puts together pieces of an older record. There is a name for the history of the lives of saints but there is no name for the sudden chaff we suppose and bear.
I got off the train and through some thick pond who now lived around me I went slowly and with no sound only notes muffled by this us we found I went to the curb and stood there in the sunlight. I soaked in what I could. I soaked in what the silence told me, how the new quiet of this big city was constructed of a union urgent by the rules of better chance. The sun was there and laid itself down on me standing at a loss inside the stillness at a loss inside the loss I knew I’d signed. The tearing away in truth what was then a gathering. Sun and stillness and the loss of what then was of course undefined. She flew back to the plains and I stood sunned and quiet with some new chart to go on with no chart in hand.
In early evening the wooded gullies of Missouri gave way to the shapes and flats of what we’d come to know as something Western. With Kansas up above us we crossed into Oklahoma and we drove. The land itself the marker for where we arrived and where we’d left. I learned how state lines are decided not so much by rivers or old clan border but are instead decided by the color and the shape and the texture of the land. How Missouri changes from Missouri into Oklahoma in the palette and the topography and the geology as New Mexico is the etched basin below the elevated floor of the Texas panhandle.
the light when the sun has gone down but there is still the red and orange glow in the sky and there are no shadows and the wind has died down and it is not yet as cold as it will get tonight and all the colors of you and where you are and what’s behind you near you are all at their most vivid and alive the colors are the skeleton of these brief moments called up in memory and sustained there.
The final notes are something of a dwindle, the music of it unmoored and underway and becoming more distant and less defined as a face becomes a different face in the almost true dark and there is only the smallest angle of light up along the visage and it turns from one into another and it’s only guessed what mood is carried and before the shape is well sussed a scattering comes and the low almost inaudible notes blow off the bow to die off on each a several and small path.
Jack Gilbert called it the angel lost in our bodies. The music that thinking is. What each of them who face each other have in common among how several they are. The mad poet Ezra Pound and the near dead father. The dancer Hugh Laing and opposite him at the end of a row of beds in a southern madhome a thin man is checked by a belt who runs from his bedframe to his wrist. Where would you be to put your ear up against any of this? What would the sound be?
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews