These lines are from the final poem in Traci Brimhall’s debut collection, Rookery. The poem, “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse,” is a fitting summation of the book that has preceded it. Many of the recurring tropes and images show up: prayer, faith, madness, father, whales, God, love, joy, death, destruction, and resurrection.

The book, as a whole, is more than the sum of its parts, and it’s clear that considerable thought was given to the arrangement (though its also possible, even probable, that many of the poems that are grouped together were also written in the same timeframe). The book begins with a prologue, “Prayer for Deeper Water,” and ends with the “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse,” quoted above. Within these bookends, the collection starts with a series of aubades and ends with a nocturne. It is divided into three sections. The first is the most personal, filled with poems about infidelity and betrayal. The second delves into formative childhood memories as well as the poet’s conflicted relationship with her parents. The third contains a mixture of personal and persona poems, with a greater fixation on death and rebirth.

Throughout, the language is surprising and delightful, gripping in its deft turn of phrase. You can pretty much turn to any page and find an image that will draw you in as it is extended to an unexpected conclusion. Take, for example, these lines from “Concerning Cuttlefish and Ugolino”:

Or this, from “Possession,” which ends with a missionary in Brazil being attacked by an anaconda:

Many of the poems in this book form a collective whole; individual poems may be marked by uncertainties that are resolved by others. Poems in the first section, for example, are individually evocative, but collectively intense. In addition to “Possession,” the middle section includes other poems about a pair of missionaries and their daughter in Brazil. After reading these poems and others in the section, I suspect that the child is the poet’s mother (though there is nothing to prove that theory). If so, that knowledge adds another layer of depth to the poems about her parents. The father apparently leaves the mother, who subsequently (or perhaps causally) descends into a state of psychosis that recreates a reality based on her fundamentalist upbringing. Some of these are truly wrenching, as when she the poet visits her in an institution and decides to “let them give your body enough electricity / to calm it.” The flat tone belies a well of conflicting emotions.

The father is also an intriguing figure. He seems to have a thing for guns—in one poem, he shoots and kills a snapping turtle, in another, he commands the poet to shoot a caged feral cat, and in another, he (if it is indeed the father) collects bullets and takes part in a Civil War reenactment. He takes the poet to a “torture museum” and takes a photo of her next to a collection of chastity belts. In another poem, he heart “is a jar of nails.” And yet, in another the poet holds the father’s hand as they “crossed the icefields / and looked into a glacier’s deepening blue.” And another poems relates how the father “came home and held my mother and pushed her / curls behind her ears and said, That kind of loneliness / is dangerous.”

There is also something unequivocally American about this book. Partly, its the undercurrent of Southern biblical tradition—more than a third of the poems mention God with a capital “G,” and a good many mention angels or scripture. Partly, its the sense of place: different poems mention Appalachia, Kentucky, Ohio, Lake Superior, Ellis Island, the Triangle Waist Shirt Factory, the Empire State Building, Philadelphia, Charleston, Atlanta, Manassas, the Mississippi. Maybe something in the diction, too, embodies a distinctly American idiom.

Case and point, I leave you with the end of “American Pastoral”:

Ditto that! And I am looking forward to seeing more from Traci Brimhall.

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