Love Prodigal

Amidst cycles of heartbreak, trauma, and chronic pain, Love Prodigal finds strength in the natural world, motherhood, desire, and new love.

Fiercely self-aware and "utterly present tense," Traci Brimhall's Love Prodigal lives in the messiness of starting over. As Brimhall grieves a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family trauma, and chronic illness appear. There is an urge to detach, to go numb. Yet, pain is always returned as a gift-the beautiful vulnerability of feeling. In conversation with Da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bachelard, images of the phoenix appear throughout the collection; its metaphor promises an easy and endless cycle of rebirth-a forever life, forever alone. Brimhall rejects this idea, instead reaching for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. When the body becomes a site the poet "cannot live in or leave," she finds strength in the beauty of the natural world, in motherhood, in desire, in new love, in "a thousand small pleasures that made [her] want to live." Told through various forms-aubades, a prose crown of sonnets, an admissions essay-Love Prodigal to second (and third and fourth) chances. The heart gets bigger every time it heals.

Praise for Love Prodigal

“An intense flow of loose-limbed, vividly imagined, and deeply felt poems. . . . Brimhall addresses life’s everyday suffering in astonishing language that will attract a wide range of readers. Highly recommended.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal, STARRED review

“Traci Brimhall’s fifth collection simmers. . . . These poems of mid-life renewal reverberate with the past, rewritten from a transformative new landscape. . . . Throughout, Brimhall builds 'the truth of motherhood,' a motherhood set realistically within illness, divorce, transformations. As these poems enthusiastically remind us, all of life continues to happen when mothering, including the passions, bodily and poetic, that thread a body of work, a personal history that moves toward freedom and power.”—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub

“Writes with daring and dazzling descriptions of intimacies real and surreal.”—Roberta E. Winter, New York Journal of Books

“At the heart of Traci Brimhall’s enchanting new collection is the image of the phoenix, the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes—resurrection, second chances. The aubade is a recurring form in Love Prodigal, a love poem signifying sun-up, lovers parting at dawn . . . [and] interestingly, the fleuron, or glyph, that signals the start of each new section of this book, is a rising sun. All of this points to Brimhall’s overarching vision of our (i.e., her) messy human lives.”—Charles Rammelkamp, Compulsive Reader

“Love, divorce, illness, and grief are at the center of Brimhall’s expansive and moving fifth collection (after Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod). The title poem is among the book’s most evocative, framing love as something that, like the prodigal son, departs, endures hardship, and returns—sometimes changed, sometimes forgiven.”—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Traci Brimhall

“The questions posed by this stunning collection will remind readers of their own mortality, while reawakening the power and fury within them.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“This emotionally articulate, intense debut gives us the myth of self in its various incarnations: elegiac, surreal, meditative, erotic, dreamlike. I love [Brimhall’s] luscious verbal texturing and lyric slipperiness, an assertive voice, a sensuality, a glow. A beautiful book.”—Ilya Kaminsky

“Traci Brimhall’s Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod unfurls like a series of dispatches from the shores of grief, and then the burning wildfire of divorce. . . . [H]er poems feel as intimate as a handwritten letter.”—John Freeman,Literary Hub

“Poetry for the new century: awake to the world, spiritually profound, and radiant with lyric intelligence.”—Carolyn Forché

“. . . Traci Brimhall’s new work is brutal and blisteringly beautiful. . . .Our Lady of the Ruins is dangerously alive.”—Tracy K. Smith

“With each successive book, there’s even more grandness to Brimhall’s narrative voice. She writes with a commanding sense, with some poems feeling like the voice beaming to Job, and other poems arriving like a hypnotizing whisper at night. . . . Another masterful book from one of our finest poets.”—Millions

Traci Brimhall is the author of five books of poetry and currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Kansas. She holds degrees from Florida State University (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA), and Western Michigan University (PhD). Her poems have appeared inThe New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, Slate, The New Republic, and Best American Poetry, among others. Brimhall teaches Creative Writing at Kansas State University and lives in Wichita.

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