Mother, Loose
Yes, I will be the words / in our little threnody.
Winner of the Judge’s Choice Award, Accents Publishing
Full of ripe, aching music, Brandel France de Bravo's MOTHER, LOOSE captures the overlap between what we chant as comfort and what we choose as elegy. Nursery rhymes become impishly twisted…
Deft and heartbreaking, these poems ask us to step out from under the sheltering wing of Mama Goose, and into the arms of Morpheus. Let this collection cradle your heart in its hand.
—Sandra Beasley, author of I Was the Jukebox and Count the Waves
Praise & Testimonials
Mother, Loose can be sad and serious, or playful and whimsical. But its sense of urgency, almost like the driving rhythm of a Beethoven symphony, compels you to keep reading.
— Hannah Rodabaugh, PANK magazine
Mother, Loose begins at the intersection of Mother Goose and Sylvia Plath. The poems that grow from within this deliberate space do so with the determination of vegetation pressing, purposeful, through sidewalk cracks. In this act, a new kind of nursery rhyme emerges.
— Sivan Butler-Rotholz, Diode
This is a delightful funny, sad book making us believe that the power of the image is the most important issue of the day.
— Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent: March 2015 Exemplars
“Brandel France de Bravo is Mother Goose for our new age. Every one of the poems in Mother, Loose is worthy of keen attention. de Bravo reinvents the world we used to know by welcoming in the reader with familiar and open arms, cookies in the oven, a warm fire in the hearth. Then she lowers her excellent boom.”
— Michael Dennis, Today’s Book of Poetry
Listen
I am fascinated by Mother Goose rhymes—they way they stay with you, like a baby tooth that lingers into middle age (I have one of those that’s finally giving up the ghost). The simple rhymes bring bodily joy—to repeat them is to remember pumping your legs on a swing. While their forms are tight and unwavering—closed even—there is something Steinian and open-ended about their nonsense-wisdom. After all these years, I still find many of them mysterious, as though they were excerpts or fragments from a larger narrative. All those Jacks, each with his own story: the one who went up the hill, the one who sits in a corner, the thin one with the rotund wife. They beg for, if not completion, amplification.
While we may not have known it as children, nursery rhymes contain ghosts of history and custom. Surely, we felt those ghosts, just as we felt, and I still feel, the darkness behind the rhymes. It is there like the bird leg hidden beneath the skirt of the old woman said to be the source of these rhymes. You could say that nursery rhymes are a lot like our mothers: they are soothing as a washcloth on the forehead, but they have a “past.” This past is not spoken of so much as hinted at. As a young girl, I was frightened and seduced by the wickedness of Mother Goose rhymes: Peter who put his wife in a pumpkin shell, and Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie who kissed the girls and made them cry. How could I not want a kiss so powerful that it would make me cry?
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