Reconstructions
available from Sibling Rivalry Press
“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. I am in love with this book and, like any good love, Reconstructions charges me with reckoning and makes me want it.” — Claire Schwartz
“Bradley Trumpfheller has made for us (the ‘unbecame beloved across’) a simply stunning book that begs to be read aloud. I’m reminded here how tender and intelligent, how generous and fierce one must be to play with language, to let it make and be made from one’s body, to construct and to be re-constructed, to say anything one means and know ‘it will never mean again, not even now.’ I already want the audio version, the video, the wind version, the sleepover version where whomever is lying next to me spells the poems out (‘a record of an impossible thing’) by pressing them into my now-worn back.” — TC Tolbert
: [1/21/2020] … several pages … 6x9” paperback
: buy [from the publisher] [from Bookshop] [from yr local bookstore] $12 + accessible on request
: ISBN: 978-1-943977-72-7