Tag: John Brantingham

A Review of The Book of Losman

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John Brantingham Reviews

K. E. Semmel’s The Book of Losman

Santa Fe Writer’s Project, October 1, 2024

I love any novel that affirms courage and hope, especially when the world seems shoddy and evil. Kyle Semmel’s The Book of Losman (Santa Fe Writer’s Project) is such a book. At the outset, it doesn’t seem very hopeful. Daniel Losman is a divorced American man living in Copenhagen with joint custody of his three-year-old child. For a living, he translates Danish novels into English, and this profession suits him because he has Tourette syndrome, and his tics cause him to feel embarrassment and shame. However, he answers an ad for a study on his condition and finds that Dr. Pelin and Dr. Jens are developing an experimental drug called BhMe4 that will allow him, through his dreams, to access memories all the way back to his birth, so he can identify why the tics began, if there was a triggering incident, and to possibly cure himself of his condition. He journeys to these moments in his sleep while under the scrutiny of the medical professionals. He especially wants to go back to a memory where an early teacher shamed him for his tics. Losman is suffering, but as he works through this process, he finds a new way to see him, and as he begins to reject this process, he sees himself in a more holistic way. The Book of Losman is therefore not a book so much of loss and being lost as it is about hope and how Losman is able to reevaluate the shame-based approach to life that others have imposed on him; instead he finds a way into life’s richness that goes beyond binary ways of thinking and accepting other people’s diminishments as a kind of truth.

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John Brantingham: “Age of Isolation”

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Age of Isolation

So many shops downtown are closed. 
The liquor stores are still there of course, 

but maybe every third store has been 
boarded up since the pandemic started, 

knocked out like teeth on a fighter’s mouth. 
Bookstores gone, coffee shops too. 

The place where you used to go to buy 
records gone, but you suppose that 

would be abandoned anyway 
like the video game arcade you loved 

before you discovered girls. 
You wonder if this is the way of things, 

the turning of an age as the world moves 
on to a new way of being alive. 

It feels like that summer day twenty 
years ago, where you were at the park, 

but realized that kids didn’t go there any more. 
It’s like those first days of COVID 

when you looked out your door 
and understood that you could have 

a picnic on the highway, 
and not a single person would care.

About the Author: John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines. He has twenty-one books of poetry, memoir, and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press) and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press). He lives in Jamestown, New York.

Image Credit: John Margolies “Liquor store sign, Bossier City, Louisiana” (1979) Public domain image courtesy of The Library of Congress

John Brantingham: “Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War: This Is the Worst”

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Francisco Goya's The Disasters of War: This Is the Worst

My dead stand with me before Goya’s piece,
where a wolf conspires with priests to write down
orders for the poor, suffering behind
them. The poor here starve. They beg. They freeze.
The poor are not forgotten, and that’s the trouble
with people who put on frocks and play
at sanctity. It’s the trouble with the way
wolves wait and watch their desperate struggle.
But my dead whisper to me that he’s wrong.
The trouble is also that we think beasts
walk among us, but they’re ordinary
men who have discovered that if you’re strong,
you can have your way with the weak.
We have to tamp down our own cruelty.

About the Author: John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines. He has nineteen books of poetry and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press) and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press). He lives in Jamestown, New York.

Image Credit: Francisco Goya, “Esto es lo peor! (This is the worst!)” Public Domain

John Brantingham: “Joan Miro’s Portrait of Vincent Nubiola”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

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Vincent_Nubiola_Miro

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Joan Miro’s Portrait of Vincent Nubiola

Before he started painting, Miro had 
a nervous breakdown, which seems rational
given that this was Spain, and a quiet hell
had cracked open in Europe, his world gone mad,
and what could he do but watch and resist
as Franco and Adolph got together 
to dream up cynical new ways to sneer
at what could be if we would just coexist.
And then Miro started to paint, which seems
more than rational. More than sane. Portrait 
of Vincent Nubiola was an early piece.
Miro catches him in a pipe-smoking daydream,
his elbow resting on a table with fruit,
a tulip, and wine. He’s at the kind of ease

that Miro must have dreamed of. Fields stretch
out beyond him, fields where he will no doubt
return for the day’s work, worrying about
things that matter while Miro will sketch
and paint and find a place where he can stand
against what is coming. He will turn 
toward the surreal, even as Europe’s dictators
call it degenerate, and it is banned.
I imagine the two of them, Miro 
still young, but wise enough to be alarmed
at what is building. Nubiola is
a professor of agriculture who knows
Miro’s genius, a man with training and wisdom.
They sit and talk of the coming hostilities.

“It feels like the end of everything that’s right,”
my imagined Joan says. Vincent replies,
“Every generation feels this. It’s an endless fight.”
And Joan can foresee an endless night
of terror. He thinks of all who will die
and to him it is the end of everything that’s right.
And Vincent remembers stories of knights
in his childhood and King Alfonso’s lies,
and he knows this is an endless fight.
Old men get a sexual thrill at the sight
of young men dying. They get off on cries
of anguish, and maybe it’s the end of right,
but he tells Joan they’ll keep moving despite
the horror of old men’s pornography.
This, Vincent tells Joan, must remain an endless fight
because these old men live for this kind of blight,
but this world was made for Miro’s kind of beauty.
We must keep going to keep everything right.
That is the beauty of our endless fight.

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About the Author: John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has nineteen books of poetry and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). He teaches at Mt. San Antonio College.

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Image Credit: Joan Miro “Portrait of Vincent Nubiola” (1917) Public Domain

John Brantingham: Five Poems About the Santa Ana Winds

Posted on by Chase Dimock

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Still for a While

We get a Santa Ana
and wake to streets
full of branches
and trash and a palm tree

that’s crashed down
through the wrought iron fence
around the city yard.
Today, the air is still

for a while, but the winds
always come back,
or they have so far.
The train tracks are

covered in tumbleweeds.
This air that has come down
from the highland deserts
smells clean.

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News of the Weather

The first weather report I get
is when the airport shifts
its flight pattern directly over us,
and I know the winds are coming.
The breaks in our conversation
as the engines pass above
soon become natural and unnoticed
unless one of us points them out.
The eucalyptus across the train tracks
looks shaggy today. I wonder
what it will look like tomorrow.

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Just Us

The flags on top of the tax service
and immigration building are torn
to feathers by the Santa Ana winds,
and that feels like a metaphor

for something, but I’m not sure what.
The winds have always felt
more symbol than real to me.
They’re so dry they suck

the water right out of you.
We can see for miles across
the normally smoggy sky, and at night
we get stars. All of these things

might mean something like someone
is out there telling us something
with great clarity that I could see
except that I am limited to being just who I am.

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Baldy Winds

After the winds
have died down
here in the valley,
they are still rising
a mist of snow
blowing it off the top
of Mt. Baldy,
which I can see
headed straight up
Euclid Avenue.
It’s still early
on a Sunday morning,
and I’m the only one
out in the world
made clean
by the Santa Anas.
The dawn has no transition
through filtered air.
One moment it’s night,
and the next it’s full day.

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The New Neighbors

When the Santa Ana picks up,
some long haul truckers
pull off the freeways
and park in the neighborhood.

We can see their cabs
in the pale blue lights
of their computers
as they wait out the winds.

When we walk the dog
down the street in the evening,
we invade their space.
This is now their backyard.

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About the Author, John Brantingham: I was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, and my work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. I have eleven books of poetry and fiction including my latest fiction collection Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). I teach at Mt. San Antonio College.

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Image Credit: Impressions of Southern California by Chase Dimock