Dream of No One but Myself

David Bradford

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771315616
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Poesie

Winner 2022 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry

Shortlisted 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize

Shortlisted 2022 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

2022 Governor General's Literary Awards Finalist

2022 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal Jury Selection

Shortlisted 2022 Concordia University First Book Prize

An expansive, hybrid, debut collection of prose poems, self-erasures, verse, and family photo cut-ups about growing up in a racially trinary, diversely troubled family.

Dream of No One but Myself is an interdisciplinary, lyrical unravelling of the trauma-memoir-as-proof-it's-now-handled motif, illuminating what an auto-archival alternative to it might look like in motion. Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, David Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can't quite reconcile. The translation of early memory into language is a set of decisions, and in Dream of No One but Myself, Bradford decides and then decides again, composing a deliberately unstable, frayed account of family inheritance, intergenerational traumas, and domestic tenderness.

More essayistic lyric than lyrical essay, this is a satisfyingly unsettling and off-kilter debut that charts, shapes, fragments, and embraces the unresolvable. These gorgeous, halting poems ultimately take the urge to make linear sense of one's own history and diffract it into innumerable beams of light.

The Other Men

The other men. At least a little like him. Tying the deaf Dalmatian to the doghouse year round. Set to leave the country after borrowing money from the wrong people. Throwing the TV in the pool—she wouldn’t hand over the remote. Casing and clipping bullets in the basement while we wait for the pizza. Just the ones on our street his age. Who built our deck on a whim.

Brought nail guns. Helped pick up the lumber. The one happy to foreman. The other, the one who’d leave, happy to draft. My father handled his father’s mail for years after he left. Visited the old man every other week. Just because. Followed the other to softball. Had beers for weeks with TV after his daughter passed.

My father, who never forgot an aunt or uncle’s name. Never had any of his own. And always made a point of saying hi, joking, laughing. Believed in family, even not knowing it. Never without a smile or googly eyes or compliment. For anyone else’s kid. Wanting to be wanted. So badly. Always convincing that way.

Like how he wouldn’t quit Little League till a few years after I did. And I resented it. His feeling useful. In a way he wouldn’t at home. Another kind of ease out in the open.

Like, just recently, the man I’m barely remembering. Father and nice. I’m realizing he was from the year I was away. And I was just a kid to impress on weekends. How much easier it must have been for him. Just get the kid to like me. Extracurricular. Not yet granted. Rolling around in the leaves. Have his mother to myself all week. Snowball fights with the neighbour kids. Things those other men never did.

Like the night he died. At my godparents’. Talking to an old friend on the anniversary of his best friend’s death. How this old friend happened upon him in little pieces in the jungle in Vietnam. And hasn’t rung in a February 15th since without a bottle in hand. My father, that night, kept him laughing in the living room, away from drinking, past midnight. And made sure he made it to bed that way.

My father, just back from a business trip. Lungs still crackling from the thin Utah air. My godmother was the one who found him. Around four in the morning. In the bathroom. Lights on. Still standing.

He got so thin, she says. Just like me.²³

23 Half of those other men are also dead now. The deck only a few years gone.

It occurred to me only recently.

That the iron and doorknob trick may

have been designed to protect him,

every time his mother did it,

from her. That it was meant

to keep her out of the room,

not just him in.

There she was at the Human

Gift Registry memorial in

her best Candomblé whites,

in a wheelchair, surrounded by

her chosen family and friends,

handi...