Overview

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR POETRY An expansive, hybrid, debut collection of prose poems, self-erasures, verse, and family photo cut-ups about growing up in a racially trinary, diversely troubled family. Dream of No One but Myself is an interdisciplinary, lyrical unravelling of the trauma-memoir-as-proof-it's-now-handled motif, illuminating what an auto-archival alternative to it might look like in motion. Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, D.M. Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can't quite reconcile. The translation of early memory into language is a set of decisions, and in Dream of No One but Myself, Bradford decides and then decides again, composing a deliberately unstable, frayed account of family inheritance, intergenerational traumas, and domestic tenderness. More essayistic lyric than lyrical essay, this is a satisfyingly unsettling and off-kilter debut that charts, shapes, fragments, and embraces the unresolvable. These gorgeous, halting poems ultimately take the urge to make linear sense of one's own history and diffract it into innumerable beams of light.

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9781771315609

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Reviews

How does sound assemble meaning, assemble relationships across time lines, patterned, steeped, torn and adorned? David Bradford's lyric compositions and decompositions perform narration erasures, narrating to unnarrate, visual, textual--and to somehow also live again in language, in consideration and construction, as recognition's dream. -- Hoa Nguyen, author of Violet Energy Ingots In Dream of No One but Myself, the structural instability of a dream is mapped onto a family. It is then reflected in the mutability of poetic form. A father's estrangement pulls a child into contradiction, toward desiring connection while straining away from that connection. Poetic form also strains, stretches from prose poems in compact rhythmic units to disjunctive works that slice across the page, to suites of anguished, cut-up family photographs and beautifully abstract, decomposing erasure works that bloom into ruinous new shapes. These formal strategies are never forced; rather, they establish a narrative that doubles - that infuses and is transformed by - the Dream of No One but Myself. --Kaie Kellough, author of Magnetic Equator

How does sound assemble meaning, assemble relationships across time lines, patterned, steeped, torn and adorned? David Bradford's lyric compositions and decompositions perform narration erasures, narrating to unnarrate, visual, textual--and to somehow also live again in language, in consideration and construction, as recognition's dream.--Hoa Nguyen, author of Violet Energy Ingots In Dream of No One but Myself, the structural instability of a dream is mapped onto a family. It is then reflected in the mutability of poetic form. A father's estrangement pulls a child into contradiction, toward desiring connection while straining away from that connection. Poetic form also strains, stretches from prose poems in compact rhythmic units to disjunctive works that slice across the page, to suites of anguished, cut-up family photographs and beautifully abstract, decomposing erasure works that bloom into ruinous new shapes. These formal strategies are never forced; rather, they establish a narrative that doubles - that infuses and is transformed by--the Dream of No One but Myself.--Kaie Kellough, author of Magnetic Equator

How does sound assemble meaning, assemble relationships across time lines, patterned, steeped, torn and adorned? David Bradford's lyric compositions and decompositions perform narration erasures, narrating to unnarrate, visual, textual--and to somehow also live again in language, in consideration and construction, as recognition's dream. -- Hoa Nguyen, author of Violet Energy Ingots In Dream of No One but Myself, the structural instability of a dream is mapped onto a family. It is then reflected in the mutability of poetic form. A father's estrangement pulls a child into contradiction, toward desiring connection while straining away from that connection. Poetic form also strains, stretches from prose poems in compact rhythmic units to disjunctive works that slice across the page, to suites of anguished, cut-up family photographs and beautifully abstract, decomposing erasure works that bloom into ruinous new shapes. These formal strategies are never forced; rather, they establish a narrative that doubles - that infuses and is transformed by - the Dream of No One but Myself. --Kaie Kellough, author of Magnetic Equator How does sound assemble meaning, assemble relationships across time lines, patterned, steeped, torn and adorned? David Bradford's lyric compositions and decompositions perform narration erasures, narrating to unnarrate, visual, textual--and to somehow also live again in language, in consideration and construction, as recognition's dream. -- Hoa Nguyen, author of Violet Energy Ingots In Dream of No One but Myself, the structural instability of a dream is mapped onto a family. It is then reflected in the mutability of poetic form. A father's estrangement pulls a child into contradiction, toward desiring connection while straining away from that connection. Poetic form also strains, stretches from prose poems in compact rhythmic units to disjunctive works that slice across the page, to suites of anguished, cut-up family photographs and beautifully abstract, decomposing erasure works that bloom into ruinous new shapes. These formal strategies are never forced; rather, they establish a narrative that doubles - that infuses and is transformed by - the Dream of No One but Myself. --Kaie Kellough, author of Magnetic Equator

How does sound assemble meaning, assemble relationships across time lines, patterned, steeped, torn and adorned? David Bradford's lyric compositions and decompositions perform narration erasures, narrating to unnarrate, visual, textual--and to somehow also live again in language, in consideration and construction, as recognition's dream. --Hoa Nguyen, author of Violet Energy Ingots In Dream of No One but Myself, the structural instability of a dream is mapped onto a family. It is then reflected in the mutability of poetic form. A father's estrangement pulls a child into contradiction, toward desiring connection while straining away from that connection. Poetic form also strains, stretches from prose poems in compact rhythmic units to disjunctive works that slice across the page, to suites of anguished, cut-up family photographs and beautifully abstract, decomposing erasure works that bloom into ruinous new shapes. These formal strategies are never forced; rather, they establish a narrative that doubles - that infuses and is transformed by--the Dream of No One but Myself. --Kaie Kellough, author of Magnetic Equator How does sound assemble meaning, assemble relationships across time lines, patterned, steeped, torn and adorned? David Bradford's lyric compositions and decompositions perform narration erasures, narrating to unnarrate, visual, textual--and to somehow also live again in language, in consideration and construction, as recognition's dream.--Hoa Nguyen, author of Violet Energy Ingots In Dream of No One but Myself, the structural instability of a dream is mapped onto a family. It is then reflected in the mutability of poetic form. A father's estrangement pulls a child into contradiction, toward desiring connection while straining away from that connection. Poetic form also strains, stretches from prose poems in compact rhythmic units to disjunctive works that slice across the page, to suites of anguished, cut-up family photographs and beautifully abstract, decomposing erasure works that bloom into ruinous new shapes. These formal strategies are never forced; rather, they establish a narrative that doubles - that infuses and is transformed by--the Dream of No One but Myself.--Kaie Kellough, author of Magnetic Equator

Author Information

Darby Minott Bradford is a poet, editor, and organizer based in Tiohtià ke (Montréal). They are the author of several chapbooks, including Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). Their work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, filling Station, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere. They hold an MFA from the University of Guelph and are a founding editor of House House Press. Dream of No One but Myself is their first book.

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