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    Locomotive Cathedral

    Brandel France de Bravo (Author)

    9781496240088

    Paperback / softback, published 1 March 2025

    112 pages
    22.9 x 15.2 x 0.7 cm, 0.18 kg

    “Kinetic and spectral, wise and suspicious of wisdom, Brandel France de Bravo’s Locomotive Cathedral chugs into an expansive, vaulted space, where ‘any raised surface can be an altar,’ via a hybrid text of poems, prose poems, and brief lyric essays. There is even a companion crow with one foot, RenÉ, who, like the speaker, is compelling and brilliant and makes no promises. Deft with figurative language-‘Like restaurant carp, we are learning to live in this aquarium,’-France de Bravo also questions the whole enterprise. ‘Metaphors can seem so transactional, language doing business, swapping currency,’ she writes, in a zuihitsu on giving and taking. Nothing here is undisputable, even the tools of the trade, and I love it. I love her parables breathing contemporary life into twelfth-century Tibetan Buddhist slogans on mind training-‘And then, there was the time I drove a dangerous highway, / thumb-drive buried in my bun . . . files and poems bobby-pinned / to my skull.’ I love the poems on flood and fire and plague, on dryer lint and home improvement, on the subject/object conundrum, on the woman, a mature, exhilarative presence, and on the one-legged crow, who has the first word, and the last.”-Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
    “The muse of this collection is a one-legged crow, and crow it does, with an insinuating, insistent music and a wily, restless aesthetic that hops from brilliant image to sly aphorism to tender insight. These poems are luminously dark, keenly observant, and endlessly curious about the whole symphony of existence, where nothing is lost, everything is transformed, and we live our lives ‘not dying, but molting.’ Locomotive Cathedral is marked by its unflinching yet compassionate gaze; we are blessed to have it.”-Michael Bazzett, author of The Echo Chamber
    “Brandel France de Bravo’s Locomotive Cathedral is a panoramic meditation ushering us into stillness. With grace and humility, in a skillful range of forms, France de Bravo sings a praise song to surrender. When living means ‘cycling through the stink and stain,’ France de Bravo celebrates the sacred pause, reminding us that ‘any raised surface can be an altar, a place to kneel.’”-Rage Hezekiah, author of Yearn

    With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life’s fluid, ungraspable nature. Poem by poem, essay by essay, she builds a temple to the perpetual motion of transformation, the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on Earth: “not dying, but molting.”
     

    Regard the Other as a Verb
    Part 1. Take & Give
    After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
    Resilience I
    Free Trade Agreement, a Zuihitsu
    Women Talking
    Love It or List It
    Staging
    People of the Dog
    Resilience II
    Resilience III
    You’re Like a Dull Knife
    The Lounge Chair Does the Work
    Taking Dictation
    Home Improvement
    Pronominal Affection
    It’s a Joy to Be Hidden and a Disaster Not to Be Found
    Fractals
    Part 2. Mind Training Slogans
    Slogan 27: Work with the Greatest Defilements First
    Slogan 25: Don’t Talk about Injured Limbs
    Slogan 7: Giving and Taking Should Be Practiced Alternately. These Two Should Ride the Breath (a.k.a. Practice Tonglen)
    Slogan 34: Don’t Transfer the Ox’s Load to the Cow
    Slogan 8: Three Objects, Three Poisons, Three Seeds of Virtue
    Slogan 1: Train in the Preliminaries
    Slogan 20: Of the Two Witnesses, Hold the Principal One
    Slogan 38: Don’t Seek Others’ Pain as the Limbs of Your Own Happiness
    Slogan 49: Always Meditate on Whatever Provokes Resentment
    Slogan 59: Don’t Expect Applause
    Slogan 4: Self-Liberate Even the Antidote
    Slogan 28: Abandon All Hope of Fruition
    Part 3. After the Before Times
    Resilience IV
    What It Took and What It Gave
    Resilience V
    Lying Flat
    Seam and Sieve
    Tradition Is the Prison in Which You Live
    Provincetown
    Angrief
    Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do
    If It’s in the Way, It Is the Way
    Resilience VI
    Part 4. Terminal Lucidity
    Resurrection, a Cento from My Murdered Darlings
    As Seen on TV
    Guns and Butter
    The Chemistry of Distance
    Course Correction
    Gold Chains and Squash Blossoms
    Wind in a Box
    Final Descent
    Resilience VII

    Acknowledgments
    Notes

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