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As Love Prodigal grieves a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family trauma, and chronic illness appear. There is an urge to detach, to go numb. Yet, pain is always returned as a gift—the beautiful vulnerability of feeling. Throughout the collection, in conversations with Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bachelard, images of the phoenix appear; its metaphor seems to promise an easy and endless cycle of rebirth—a forever life, forever alone. But Brimhall says, Screw that! She’d rather reach for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. When the body becomes a site the poet “cannot live in or leave,” she finds strength in the beauty of the natural world, in motherhood, in desire, in new love, in “a thousand small pleasures that made [her] want to live.”Told through various forms—aubades, a crown of prose sonnets, an admissions essay—Love Prodigal says yes to second (and third and fourth) chances. The heart gets bigger every time it heals.
Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing and narrative medicine at Kansas State University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Love Prodigal (published November 2024 by Copper Canyon). Her poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, the National Parks Service, the Academy of American Poets, and Purdue Library’s Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She’s the current poet laureate for the State of Kansas.
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