What’s at the Heart of Locomotive Cathedral

 

 

Title:  Locomotive Cathedral

Author:  Brandel France de Bravo

Publisher: The Backwaters Press

Copyright:  2025

Number of Pages:  98

Special Honor:  The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention

 

Blurbs by:  Diane Seuss, Michael Bazzette, Rage Hezekiah

 

Key Descriptors: provocative, arcane, surreal, tongue-in-cheek, climate change, pandemic, identity

 

First Sentences:  “I don’t eat crow. I feed crow.”

 

Last Sentence:  “Not dying but molting.”

 

Comment: Locomotive Cathedral by Brandel France de Bravo presents a huge struggle to keep breathing in our time of climate change, pandemic, and political unrest. At the heart of the collection, mind training slogans serve as prompts to investigate what rattles the author.

Subterraneously, a dialectic chatters about what is holy versus what is comically  morbid. For example, in “Slogan 1—Train in the preliminaries,” the narrator reveals what’s in her life’s luggage which she mocks with a lip synching of the melancholic song made popular in the late 1960s by Peggy Lee “Is That All There Is.”  There are heavy things in that weighty bag like a “daughter’s first breath,” her mother’s ashes, and a boom box with  a cassette tape of hits from the ‘60s. Other things include the more mundane like laundry detergent and a fine tooth comb which she uses to extract lice from her tangled hair.

Slogan 1 sets the stage for how to properly meditate. The poem “Slogan 1”  with its instruction train in the preliminaries provides a loose connection to the book’s title Locomotive Cathedral. Locomotive connects to the word train-ing and what is a cathedral for but a place to sit and meditate? While she’s at it, France de Bravo builds in a craziness, a loco motive that sometimes spills from its rails in mysterious ways. It’s like the crow René who opens and closes the collection and provides a kind of magic to the lonely time of the pandemic. Take time to sit with this book to reap its rewards.

Majda Gama: Singing Praise to a Girl with a Modern Upbringing

 

 Title: In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls

Author: Majda Gama

Publisher: Wandering Aengus Press

Copyright: 2025

Number of Pages: 80

Special Honor: winner, Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry

 

Blurbs by: Eman Quotah, Sahar Muradi, Alina Stefanescu

 

Key Descriptors: Punk, multi-cultural, feminist, fierce, mythic, incantatory

 

First Sentence: “A Bedouin tent, an Oriental carpet,/ men on the ground desert fashion/ lean against cushions and sip dark tea.”

 

Last Sentence: “Stars, name the girls who rise to sing new prayers to the morning.”

 

Comment: Contradictions and dualities roam freely through Majda Gama’s impressive poetry collection In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls. Right away you know in your bones from the title of the book and later in reading her poem with the same title that there’s nothing modern about what happens in that house. Gama’s book chronicles the education of a girl whose mother is American and whose father is Saudi. It’s no wonder that the narrator of these poems kept a pet rat and adopted Punk Rock culture with its safety pins and such songs as “White Punks on Dope.” However, education rules and transforms her listening from taqwacore, a subgenre of Punk music with an Arabic influence, and the Arabic poetry of Mahmoud Darwish to the English language poetry of Diane Seuss and Emily Dickinson. Expect to learn something new from Majda Gama’s poetry.—it’s rich but she’s not giving it away.

The Screens of Henry Crawford

 

Title: Screens

Author: Henry Crawford

Publisher: Broadstone Books

Copyright: 2025

Number of Pages: 72

 

Blurbs by: Donald Illich, W. Luther Jett, Jean Nordhaus, Katherine Williams

 

Key Descriptors: screens, brackets, future, life, thinking, real, surreal

 

First Sentence(s): Thank you. For picking up. This/ book.

 

Last Sentence: The moon and stars gave in/ to the mountains shouldering the night.

 

Comment: Henry Crawford is a poet philosopher. On one page, he gives you reality and, on the other, something fantastic, something surreal. He breaks barriers but he is always fixing how you can connect with him and his characters. Expect substance packaged with the ephemeral. This is real life.

Singing Praise of Canada

 

On July 1, 2025, the Rapid Response Choir assembled outside the Washington, DC, Canadian embassy to celebrate Canada Day on its 158^th anniversary. The Dresser notes this concert as a protest against the United States president Donald J. Trump, who wants Canada to become the 51^st state of the US.  Through a slight alteration of Woody Gutherie’s song “This Land Is Your Land,” the RRC founder Peter Burkholder made it clear that his group supports the independent country of Canada, the neighbor of good standing to the north of the continental United States. Burkholder got volunteers from the audience to hold up his placards which read “From the Yukon Mountains to the Price Edward Island. From the Northwest Passage to the Great Lakes waters. That land is yours and only yours.”

 

Burkholder made the point that the appropriate 51^st US state should be Washington, DC, which got a loud cheer. Invited to sing along, the gathering of approximately 100 people heard such songs as “O Canada,” “America the Beautiful,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” The Dresser’s favorite of this concert was “This Is My Song,” a poem set to Jean Sibelius’ hymn melody “Finlandia.”

 

The poetic words by Lloyd Stone are deeply meaningful in this unnecessary fight Trump has picked with an important ally.

 

This is my song, a song for all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is,
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

—“This Is My Song,” (excerpt)

 

In many ways, this protest concert was the most joyful that the Rapid Response Choir has assembled for. Many of their concerts have been in support of actions of dire consequences including the downsizing of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the many Maryland hearings on the immigration case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. More information about the RRC can be found in the Scene4 article  “Street Singers Supporting Democracy” and the RRC website.

Two Star Storytellers in One Rollicking Book

 

The Dresser is using the following approach for reviewing in the hope that others will join in to do a more extended review. In any case, the Dresser (a.k.a. Karren Alenier) wrote a blurb for this book.

 

 

Title: Fables from Italy and Beyond

 

Authors: Grace Cavalieri & Geoffrey Himes

 

Publisher: Bordighera Press

 

Copyright: 2025

 

Number of Pages: 100

 

 

Blurbs by: John Doe, Sabine Pascarelli, Karren LaLonde Alenier, Mike Maggio

 

Key Descriptors: Italy, love, music, folktales, magic

 

First Sentence: When a harmonica and a violin play/ the same melody a fifth apart,/ one soaks into the other. (from “The Third Voice”)

 

Last Sentence: She found love’s splendor in December/ when ice twigs captured morning light. (from “The Story Without End”)

 

Comment: This is a collaboration between two super stars in the publishing world. Grace Cavalieri’s poetry has been published in book form too many times to count while she continues to promote other poets through her public audio platform from the Library of Congress “The Poet and the Poem.” Geoffrey Himes is a well-known journalist writing for major newspapers like the Washington Post, NY Times, and Rolling Stone. He has written books on such music figures as Bruce Springsteen and Emmylou Harris. His poetry has been published in such publications as Best American Poetry and Gargoyle. 

 

Riding “the cannon ball of melody”, Grace Cavalieri and Geoffrey Himes create together Fables from Italy and Beyond. It’s a noisy, rollicking, blasphemous telling of old and new tales in a form not exactly poetry, not exactly prose. Take this thought-provoking work along as you journey through the dark woods of your life. 

Come Explore the Apocalypse with Carrie Bennett

 

Frequently, poets send the Dresser their books. When she gets backed up on reviewing, some books are short changed.  She’s going to try the following approach for reviewing.

 

Title: The Mouth Is Also a Compass

Author: Carrie Bennett

Publisher: Barrow Street Presss

Copyright: 2024

Number of Pages: 76

Special Honor: winner, Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize chosen by Nathalie Handal

Blurbs by: Nathalie Handal, Joan Houlihan, Diana Khoi Nguyen

Key Descriptors: climate, climate change, apocalypse, survival, feminism

First Sentence: Before I leave, Fifth Avenue becomes a desert. (from “The Expedition Begins”)

Last Sentence: The/ ocean continues to beat its enormous/ liquid heart. (from “Chapter 16: [How the Last Ice Age Appears]”)

Comment: Carrie Bennett, author of three previous volumes of poetry, is an experimentalist who often favors the prose poem. Her last section of …Compass—The Explorer’s Handbook of Survival—reads like a novel in verse.

 

InSeries: Peek at Their Commissioned Opera—Delta King's Blues

 

The InSeries of Washington, DC, noted for its updated classic opera productions, has commissioned an opera by composer Damien Geter and librettist Jarrod Lee. The opera titled Delta King’s Blues debuted January 26, 2025, as a workshop at the Martin Luther King Library in the Nation’s Capital.

 

 

The story is based on the myth that an unknown blues musician named Robert Johnson rose to celebrity status because he sold his soul to the devil when his pleas to God went unanswered. The devil then teaches Johnson how to play his steel-stringed guitar.

 

Five outstanding singers are cast in the following roles:

 

Robert Johnson (tenor): Curtis Bannister

The Devil (bass): Dr. Carl DuPont

Virginia (soprano): Melissa Wimbish

Willie (baritone): Marvin Wayne Allen

Son (tenor): Jonathan Pierce Rhodes

 

Johnson was considered a ladies’ man who was a loner, leading an itinerant life going from town to town where he usually had a woman who would look after him. One of these women appears in the Opera: the 14-year-old girl he married in 1929, but who died not long after in childbirth. Another woman (but not in the opera) that he had an off-and-on relationship with over a ten year period had a son named Robert Lockwood, Junior. Lockwood learned to play guitar from Johnson as well as stage presence and timing. By the age of 15, he traveled with Johnson and was referred to as Robert, Junior. Lockwood’s father and mother divorced, and Johnson was an unofficial stepfather to Lockwood. The character Son in Delta King’s Blues is most likely Lockwood.

 

Johnson’s mother had married twice but neither husband was Johnson’s biological father. With her first husband, the family lived in Memphis for eight or nine years, where Johnson was educated in such subjects as arithmetic, reading, language, music, geography, and physical exercise. Johnson’s education made him different from other Delta blues musicians, because he was literate and exposed to jazz, country, and other forms of popular music. His mother’s second husband was named Will "Dusty" Willis and was called Will. Will lived in the Mississippi delta. While the singers did a reasonably good job of articulating the words of the libretto, it was unclear to this audience member if the character Willie was meant to be Johnson’s 2^nd stepfather. Johnson died from an unknown cause in 1938 at the age of 27.

 

In the scant program notes, the libretto synopsis states that Johnson tries to “impress Willie, Son and Virginia” with his playing of a steel stringed guitar named Stella.” “Willie” might also refer to another blues musician. What’s clear is that this 45-minute work involves artistic license relative to the truth of Johnson’s story.

 

Geter’s complex dissonance-infused blues music is built on well-known songs by Johnson such as “Cross Roads” and “Come on in My Kitchen.” Music Director Emily Baltzer accompanied the singers with an agile and masterful piano performance. The quality of the vocal performances was excellent, particularly Curtis Bannister as Robert Johnson and Dr. Carl DuPont as the devil. This reviewer longed to hear more of the female voice. The only female singer was the impressive Melissa Wimbish, cast in the limited role of Virginia. The producers of this workshop did not include a talk-back session. Instead, the event offered a fundraising reception that followed the performance. This reviewer hopes that the piece will continue to develop. It is off to a strong start.