
Review: Reconstructions by Bradley Trumpfheller
Reviewed by Erica Charis-Molling
Reconstructions
Bradley Trumpfheller
Sibling Rivalry Press, January 2020.
$12.00; 51 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-943977-72-7
In his book, Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr writes, “What certain poets of trauma intuit is that their old self cannot survive the suffering it has experienced without succumbing [to death]. Thus necessity permits and compels imagination to create a new self, a self strong enough or different enough to move through and beyond the trauma and its aftermath.” In their debut chapbook, Reconstructions, Bradley Trumpfheller works to build a language and a narrative for a new self and their community.
The first poem, “Do You Kiss Your Boyfriend With Those Verbs,” openly acknowledges the seeming futility of the whole enterprise: “nothing worth saying stays still long enough to say it…”. Yet the poem and those that follow dare the reader to keep up with the poet’s restless reforming of English syntax and word play. “…whole flocks of I-statements cartwheel” and tumble down the page trying to rework “our old tongues / bumbled with noise & stations of scam-crosses, we might have called / each other.” Herein lies the dilemma that creates the central tension of the collection: the attempt to reconstruct the language of one’s trauma in a way that is both “different enough to move through and beyond trauma” and shared enough that we can speak to each other.
Part of the community building work, the rehabbing of a language which violently erases trans and nonbinary existence and experiences, is done through negation. We’re invited to make meaning of lines that seem almost Celan-esque in their opacity, as right in the first poem we get “…the cardinal I saw ruined / with windows was not unlike the cardinal…”. In poem after poem, the reader is presented with a world in which verbs reverse themselves through un- prefixes, where things don’t or won’t occur, where the I is “already not not not not not not miraculous.” At the heart of the book, the poet gives us a palinode: an ode whose entire work is to retract a prior statement. We’re even presented with the possibility of un-death, as a family member’s suicide is seen through the philosophical thought experiment of an unheard tree that falls in the forest: “Nobody heard my Uncle / cadaver himself.” If no one heard it, did it even happen?
The magic wrought by all this skillful negation is the presentation of both the world that exists and the world that could exist. After all, if something “unspools” in a poem, our imagination first must give us something that was spooled. In the case of the uncle, we must reckon with his death, but in parsing the negation through our imaginations, we also see a shadow of an alternate world: one in which there was a body, somebody there with the uncle in his final moments. “Creating meaning through the use of negation is a cooperative process between speaker and hearer or writer and reader [which] operates to activate implied rather than explicit meaning,” Lisa Nahajec writes in her essay “Negation and the Creation of Implicit Meaning in Poetry.”
Poem by poem, the speaker invites us into an active role in the work of Reconstruction. Stories of identity—through lovers, beloved places, and family of origin—are told and retold while simultaneously conjuring a new world, a new identity, that could be. In the poem “Monument,” the poet writes “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…”. Even if Trumpfheller has to make the reader literally turn the book to see the possibilities that written language holds (and they do through a six page poem printed sideways), the poet will continue to try to bring us into this new perspective.
By the time the final epigraph arrived, I could see it—this world that Trumpfheller and Simone Weil see, where: “The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.” I finished the book and I closed my eyes. There was the cardinal, in a world where it flies into a window that “was not,” instead of slamming into the window that was—its red feathered beauty flying through the frame, free of the threat of unseen violence.
Erica Charis-Molling is a lesbian poet, educator, and librarian. Her writing has been published in literary journals most recently including Tinderbox and Redivider. A Mass Cultural Council Fellow, she’s an alum of the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at Antioch University. She currently lives in Boston with her wife and works as Education Director for Mass Poetry and Managing Editor for Los Angeles Review.
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