Accents Publishing is proud to release Brandel France de Bravo’s Mother, Loose. Mother, Loose was selected by Patty Paine for the Judge’s Choice award in our 2014 chapbook competition. In the foreward, Patty says that she was, “struck time and again by how France de Bravo transports the reader from familiar to utterly unexpected contexts through startling imaginative leaps and unexpected metaphors.”
Mother, Loose plays with familiar nursery rhymes. Poems with titles such as “The Old Woman in the Shoe” and “Jack Sprat” give the reader a general sense of the stories being explored, but Brandel gives her unique perspective. As Sandra Beasley commented, “Nursery rhymes become impishly twisted.”
Ladybird Ladybird Fly Away Home Your House Is on Fire
Christmas and New Year’s in a valley surrounded
by mountains like Chinese scroll paintings
phone in my hand standing in the garden of
a house I no longer live in my mother says
“x-ray” her dry cough flowering unremarkable
except for its constancy walking less the year before
a winded valley surrounded by mountains until
the smokeless fingers grew bulbs (they called it
“clubbing”) sent smokeless signals “please”
I said “see someone” and after Christmas the
house I once lived in phoned the garden saying
“x-ray” like a painting “mass” white as yucca.
You can purchase Mother, Loose from the Accents store or find copies at neighborhood bookstores, such as the Morris book shop or The Wild Fig.