Reconstructions

by Bradley Trumpfheller

Where entanglements of anti-trans violence, the police state, and fascism script so much of common sense, in these resplendent poems, to settle into common sense won’t serve... Reconstructions at once brings forward the past and makes possible different futures. This is a collection underwritten by the kind of rigorous witness that only desire can forge. (Claire Schwartz, author of Bound)

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

54 pages, Paperback

First published January 21, 2020

Reviews

[el · Rating 5 out of 5]

weird and wonderful and wordy pls everyone buy a copy 🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶 also i met the author at AWP and they were soooo lovely

some absolute favorites:

Mom won't / say where she left what was left of her dress / so I put a third moon in the poem / to have enough dead light to dig by.

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show me / the place no one wants me dead & I'll show you a girl dragging / a door from the water.

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My mother's hand pointing at the harbor / makes it the harbor. Reckon the future were that: / a port. A place to begin the work / of fastening.

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It's so heaven of us to think of anything / as untimely. My mom's thumb smearing the lipstick / off my collar, my mouth. I learned speech first / as distance, second as costume jewelry.

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Imagine / waking up & being anything as yellow / as a dress. You treeline. You root song. What's an amount / of time equal / to you?

[lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

"yes / it is supposed to be this bright!" god how lovely, how shattering, how putting back together

[maren · Rating 4 out of 5]

re-reading before lending. i have a poem i could write about all of it & i might. these poems glow the way water does.

[Sahalie Angell Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning in its relevance and stark beauty, Reconstructions digs up the current American landscape and leaves it bare. The collection takes controlled leaps between ethereal hope and an unflinching commitment to reality in all its ugliness, wrapping it all in a smart and unapologetic examination of gender that invites the reader to share in the exercise of vulnerability and even compassion.

[Joseph Dante · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are poems that resist and reclaim: language, definitions, identity (mostly grappling with gender), and the landscape of the American South. I was introduced to this poet through the poems "Dream Ending in a Host of Angels Zipping Me into My Grandmother's Dress" and "Catalog of Divine Encounters in Mobile County, AL," which remain among my favorites. There is joy and veneration of the feminine and a stark portrayal of toxic masculinity and its resulting violence(s). Occasionally I felt like a few poems were beautiful nothings, since there is such an emphasis on the prettiness of the language and the wordplay, and less on the words' exact connotations. However, I think this makes sense when thinking in terms of the process of language and identity being "reconstructed." Words won't mean what you think they mean, or they surprise you with new discoveries, or there is just zero antecedents. I keep returning to these and trying to pick lines apart, and all of this is what makes this a successful collection.

[Judah · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What if none of us began with names. Imagine that. Time enough. And world.
What is possible is not what is possible to say. But we have been here before.”

a necessary reread going into another trump presidency. trumpfheller's work so provacative and deep, so honest and demanding. sighs. trans people will survive, as we always have, as we always must, and as we always will.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was exactly what i needed. going to be returning to these soon & for long

[Jaime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bradley Trumpfheller’s debut collection, Reconstructions, carries such abundance I often needed to pause to take a deep breath. These poems are filled with life and light, particularly that warm light unique to the American south—poems overflow with floral dresses, pick-ups, pickles, bell peppers, fiddleleaves and fescue, spit and zippers, pelicans, and so many moons. Amidst all these riches, there’s pleasure in sonics and humor. The opening poem, “Do You Kiss Your Boyfriend with Those Verbs,” demonstrates their playfulness, “moons moon & giggle / while whole flocks of I-statements cartwheel into whatever city signifies…”. However fun this poem is sonically and syntactically, it also introduces the serious work of the collection: “never say heaven unless you mean the past // tense of to heave. as in I am heaven towards what, in our old tongues / bumbled with noise.” Trumpfheller reclaims language for their own making of meaning, which is a deliberate way of self-definition in a world where trans bodies and narratives are so often limited by definitions. They reconstruct language as an act of hope and write a multi-dimensional narrative of trans experience that is sexy and full of awe, troubling the narrative of trans victimhood, “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.” They confuse traditional constructs of the body just as they challenge constructs of language: “What does the body, / in language, amount to? Wind. Wind, being wound.” Instead, these poems offer trans narratives that are full of love and loneliness and ache and insight. “I rediscovered kissing foreheads & it is so yes again” is such a tender thing. While Trumpfheller’s poems are forward-facing for a queer future, they also find resilience in the poet’s two grandmothers who often appear in the southern timescapes of these poems. The poet dreams of wearing their floral dresses and addresses them directly: “Grandma, I want to see // you, alive / & humming // a lullaby into your lover’s hair / while she makes you // breakfast. / Unkie, tell me the moon / cares so much about us/ that it has to stop // & start itself over again. / That kind of love.” Trumpfheller’s poems reconstruct definitions and paradigms to seek a new kind of love and all sorts of possible ways of being in the world.

Originally published in Kenyon Review, "Poets on Poets"
https://kenyonreview.org/2020/04/poet...