Dream of No One but Myself

by D.M. Bradford

Winner of the 2022 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry * 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist * 2022 Governor General's Literary Award Shortlist * 2022 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Shortlist * 2022 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal Jury Selection * 2022 Concordia University First Book Prize Shortlist An expansive, hybrid, debut collection of prose poems, self-erasures, verse, and family photo cut-ups about growing up in a racially trinary, diversely troubled family. Dream of No One but Myself is an interdisciplinary, lyrical unravelling of the trauma-memoir-as-proof-it's-now-handled motif, illuminating what an auto-archival alternative to it might look like in motion. Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, David Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can't quite reconcile. The translation of early memory into language is a set of decisions, and in Dream of No One but Myself , Bradford decides and then decides again, composing a deliberately unstable, frayed account of family inheritance, intergenerational traumas, and domestic tenderness. More essayistic lyric than lyrical essay, this is a satisfyingly unsettling and off-kilter debut that charts, shapes, fragments, and embraces the unresolvable. These gorgeous, halting poems ultimately take the urge to make linear sense of one's own history and diffract it into innumerable beams of light.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

111 pages, Paperback

Published October 7, 2021

Reviews

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning first book. I read every word twice.

[Tara McGowan-Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of book you buy as a gift for someone to prove how extremely deep you are, how good your taste is.

[Pierre-Luc Landry · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Not that I know what to do with that.
But I keep on thinking on it.”

Powerful collection of experimental and visual poetry about an abusive father. And love

[Carson Meloche · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5
i find poetry books like this hard to get into but once i catch on im hooked and loving every page. i love the extreme attention to detail that went into this!