Provenance

loose as an apricot / that precocious apple / Lolita of a peach

We meet a Mayan cowboy, Archimedes, a diamond smuggler and a nightclubbing saint in this collection of poems bound together by the themes of place and origin. In Provenance, Brandel France de Bravo explores not only her own roots, but the roots of words.

Taking her cue from Ralph Walso Emerson who said, "Every word was once a poem," she has written 26 poems—one for every letter—inspired by etymologies.

By braiding autobiography with the biographies of "Apricot," and "Zygote" and everything inbetween, the poet tells a story that transports us to places both familiar and far-away.

Praise & Testimonials

“…great verbal richness and ingenuity of word and mind; such a project shouldn’t work, going through the alphabet for poems, but obviously you torque and twist and personalize it; the poems are beautifully written meditations at lots of different distances. Really striking. Beautiful book!”

—Tony Hoagland

“Sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, sharply etched and sharply worded, Provenance is a book of alphabets and fables, of narrative precision and verbal passion. Across a host of exotic locales, and through the labyrinth of etymology, Brandel France de Bravo is a poet of restless travel and linguistic inquiry—what luck for the reader who accompanies her on the voyage!”

—Campbell McGrath

“In Provenance, Brandel France de Bravo writes with urgency of continuous displacement, an exile status rendering her exquisitely sensitive to the textures of daily life. She is forever a stranger among those who do not ask ‘where I’m from, but where I’ve just come from, / which country I left last.’ At home in many cultures, at home innone, this gifted poet transforms a search for identity into a voyage through language, and finds her true roots in the alphabet letters that generate experience. This is a remarkable first book, and an important one in our time.”

—Grace Schulman

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