Full Description
With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as "baptism on repeat." Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life's fluid, ungraspable nature. Poem by poem, essay by essay, she builds a temple to the perpetual motion of transformation, the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on Earth: "not dying, but molting."
Contents
Regard the Other as a Verb
Part 1. Take & Give
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
Resilience I
Free Trade Agreement, a Zuihitsu
Women Talking
Love It or List It
Staging
People of the Dog
Resilience II
Resilience III
You're Like a Dull Knife
The Lounge Chair Does the Work
Taking Dictation
Home Improvement
Pronominal Affection
It's a Joy to Be Hidden and a Disaster Not to Be Found
Fractals
Part 2. Mind Training Slogans
Slogan 27: Work with the Greatest Defilements First
Slogan 25: Don't Talk about Injured Limbs
Slogan 7: Giving and Taking Should Be Practiced Alternately. These Two Should Ride the Breath (a.k.a. Practice Tonglen)
Slogan 34: Don't Transfer the Ox's Load to the Cow
Slogan 8: Three Objects, Three Poisons, Three Seeds of Virtue
Slogan 1: Train in the Preliminaries
Slogan 20: Of the Two Witnesses, Hold the Principal One
Slogan 38: Don't Seek Others' Pain as the Limbs of Your Own Happiness
Slogan 49: Always Meditate on Whatever Provokes Resentment
Slogan 59: Don't Expect Applause
Slogan 4: Self-Liberate Even the Antidote
Slogan 28: Abandon All Hope of Fruition
Part 3. After the Before Times
Resilience IV
What It Took and What It Gave
Resilience V
Lying Flat
Seam and Sieve
Tradition Is the Prison in Which You Live
Provincetown
Angrief
Now You Don't See It, Now You Do
If It's in the Way, It Is the Way
Resilience VI
Part 4. Terminal Lucidity
Resurrection, a Cento from My Murdered Darlings
As Seen on TV
Guns and Butter
The Chemistry of Distance
Course Correction
Gold Chains and Squash Blossoms
Wind in a Box
Final Descent
Resilience VII
Acknowledgments
Notes
