Traci Brimhall

Traci Brimhall Poems

Traci Brimhall Biography

Traci Brimhall is a poet and professor in the United States. she teaches creative writing at Kansas State University. Brimhall graduated from Florida State University with a BA, and Sarah Lawrence College with an MFA, and Western Michigan University. Brimhall authored Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012) and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Our Lady of Ruins was won the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, awarded by Carolyn Forché. Rookery won the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and was afinalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Brimhall's work has also been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Believer, Kenyon Review, and The New Republic. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best of the Net, PBS Newshour, and Best American Poetry in 2013 and 2014. She has also worked with Eryn Cruft on poetry comics that have been published in Guernica, The Poetry Comics, and Nashville Review. The duo published The Wrong Side of Rapture through Ninth Letter in 2013. Brimhall co-authored the chapbook Bright Power with Brynn Saito Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2013). Brimhall received a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry as well as the 2012 Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi,and the 2008-2009 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She has also been supported by the Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Writer’s Center of Bethesda, Vermont Studio Center, the Disquiet International Literary Program, and the Arctic Circle Residency. She was a King/Chávez/Parks Fellow.)

The Best Poem Of Traci Brimhall

Our Bodies Break Light

We crawl through the tall grass and idle light,

our chests against the earth so we can hear the river


underground. Our backs carry rotting wood and books

that hold no stories of damnation or miracles.


One day as we listen for water, we find a beekeeper—

one eye pearled by a cataract, the other cut out by his own hand


so he might know both types of blindness. When we stand

in front of him, he says we are prisms breaking light into color—


our right shoulders red, our left hips a wavering indigo.

His apiaries are empty except for dead queens, and he sits


on his quiet boxes humming as he licks honey from the bodies

of drones. He tells me he smelled my southern skin for miles,


says the graveyard is full of dead prophets. To you, he presents

his arms, tattooed with songs slave catchers whistle


as they unleash the dogs. He lets you see the burns on his chest

from the time he set fire to boats and pushed them out to sea.


You ask why no one believes in madness anymore,

and he tells you stars need a darkness to see themselves by.


When you ask about resurrection, he says, How can you doubt?

and shows you a deer licking salt from a lynched man's palm.

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