Reconstructions

Reconstructions

By Bradley Trumpfheller

Released January 21, 2020

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. Language twirls under Trumpfheller’s genius: ‘What does the body, / in language, amount to? Wind. Wind, being wound.’ These poems burst meaning open, charting a wild map of unruly kinships and queer alternatives. As its title promises, 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. But if language here is always gesturing toward an elsewhere, the speaker is not deluded by their own fantasy: ‘there are worlds where all of this is true / & we still do not survive.’ And yet, what is not is also what could be. Distance is desire’s condition. These poems thrive in the dazzle of that desire. (Claire Schwartz, author of Bound)

Bradley Trumpfheller is from Alabama & Virginia. Their work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, jubilat, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. They co-edit Divedapper & currently live in Massachusetts.