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.
