Mother, Loose

Mother, Loose is the winner of the Judge's Choice Award for the Accents Publishing 2014 Poetry Chapbook Contest. "Full of ripe, aching music, Brandel France de Bravo's Mother, Loose captures the overlap between what we chant as comfort and what we choose as elegy. Nursery rhymes become impishly twisted: "Social climber, / they called me," Humpty Dumpty admits, while Mary and herlamb pick out "Teat Peach" polish to get their nails done. But another mother hovers, her "dry cough owering" into malignancy, and a walk beneath the about-to-bloom cherry trees of DC becomes a bittersweet recognition of "Resurgence ... as after / dormancy, remission, as after asleep / we knew we would wake from." Deft and heartbreaking, these poems ask us to step out from under the sheltering wing of Mama Goose, and into the arms of Morpheus. Let this collection cradle your heart in its hand." -Sandra Beasley