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 RenĂ© 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.
