The Nameless has been busy. It has had a couple of glowing reviews from stellar writers, won a book award, and was featured in a recent interview with Sandra Simonds.

In a recent review of the collection, Jim Brock writes, “This unguarded work seems the very product of Muriel Rukeyser’s question: “What would happen if one woman told the truth of her life?” The world that Brandi George has split open contains all the invisible names of death, all the fecund beauty we long for, and a billion seeds that will germinate from the dead.” If you would like to read the full review, check out Brock’s piece in the Florida Review, “All Bird.”

In another review, “There Must Be a God of Mycelium,” Garret Ashley writes, “Rather than evoking images of the demons we’re familiar with through popular media, the narrator is possessed by demons inspired by nature: a mycelium emporex, by dueling bird spirits, by “wings beating / & rush of wind.” Accepting these possessions by the god of non-religion, non-mankind, the non-verbalized, as the speaker does early on, allows her an escape from the oppression of fundamentalist religion.” To read the full review, check out the piece at The Collidescope.

The Nameless also won an Eyeland International Book Award in the Published Poetry Category.

And I was interviewed by the amazing poet, novelist, and critic Sandra Simonds. Here is an exceprt:

Sandra: The Nameless is a book that feels adamant about taking up all of the space it needs, feels like a book that, from the first urgent utterance, immediately moves beyond the confines of “what can be said in language.” Women are often told that their feelings, emotions, ideas are “excessive.” I’d love for you to talk about the relationship between excess, form, and language. 

Brandi: Yes, it is 200 pages long, which is pretty excessive for a book of poetry! 

Excess is something that our culture is uncomfortable with. We’re always told to be reasonable, logical, to pull it together, to be quiet, kind, giving, pliable, helpful. We’re asked to swallow our emotions so that we don’t make others uncomfortable. This implies that excess is frightening and subversive. In excess there is the potential to break comfortable modes of thinking and feeling. In excess there is a space for new ideas, new forms, new ways of being in the world, and relating to each other. It’s no wonder that we’re discouraged from excesses of emotion and taking up too much space.

I think of this “excess” as the creative impulse itself. It is the power to manifest a work of art, to form a structure, to mutate, to grow, to connect. And emotion drives everything in a work of art. It pushes us beyond the limitations of our paradigms, our habitual modes of thinking and responding to the world. The feeling is what drives the poetry, and the feeling is what manifests as form and structure—syntactical structure, lineation, and even the movement of the images or narrative. Emotion drives it all. I believe emotion is the language of the spirit. It’s through emotion that we connect to ourselves and find a unique voice (or a particular rhythm of consciousness), to other people, to the more-than-human world, and especially to readers. Emotion facilitates all of this. Emotion leads us as individuals, and through individuals, to the larger community. This all starts with excess.

To read the full interview, go to Jacket2!

Joe named twenty-three books as “explosive,” “groundbreaking,” and “essential” reads for summer. In his piece, “Indie Books to Watch for Summer 2023,” The Nameless was one of three poetry books chosen, along with Sara Quinn Rivara’s Little Beast and Maya Williams’s Judas & Suicide. I’m really looking forward to reading these other two books of poetry because they seem to blend experimental forms with imagery from the unconscious, as well as an embodied attention to sound. I love how great books can destroy us and remake us, and I appreciate this reading list for summer. I’ll put these in the queue.

You can order my new memoir-in-verse, The Nameless, from Kernpunkt Press!

The Nameless explores visions of the figure of Death as a friend, a tormentor, a savior, and a capricious and mysterious force. Death is my constant companion through an exorcism, the burning of my poems, an attempted suicide, and finally, my preoccupation with worldly success. Throughout all of this, I am guided by my great loves, poetry, the creative power of the occult, and Ashtanga yoga. As one who has chosen alternative methods of living with mental illness, rather than traditional therapy and medication, these forms of healing are essential to me. Instead of hallucinations, I think of my experiences as visions, and I am liberated by the sense of polyphony and dissolution that is inherent in the pronoun “we” throughout the book.  

Praise for The Nameless:

“It’s not possible for me to imagine a book more challenging or more pleasurable than this one. Does that sound like a contradiction? It isn’t. There is a single speaker but two alternating voices here, one that speaks directly to us of hard knocks and then happiness and another that paints an updated portrait of the fairy-tale heroine Thumbelina, who also goes through some rough patches before her life takes a turn for the better. As you read these entwined tales of trauma and redemption, you’ll dive deep but be saved at the end – poetry will save you, as it only can when it’s in the hands of someone as inventive as Brandi George. I want to re-read this book. I want everyone to read it.” –David Kirby, author of The House of Blue Light

“With an ear for music and a heart for narrative, Brandi George has spun an ambitious epic of the psyche that seamlessly blends inner and outer worlds. Capacious, sprawling, and ambitious, The Nameless applies chthonic archetypal energy to the trauma of the contemporary dysfunctional family, uniting myth, memoir, and music in a wrenching bildungsroman of poetic survival. George pulls no punches, generously channeling the pain of a creative life-journey as well as the power of the forces that can redeem it: Nature, Imagination, and the Divine Feminine. —Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems

“Brandi George creates a magical, frightening, and compassionate world in The Nameless. Visible and invisible experiences meld with objects below ground and above ground to create a way of survival. Abuse, mycelium, exorcism, love, trees, loneliness, mushrooms, friendship, trees, poetry, moon and more weave their way through this stunning lyrical narrative. Here we have a new language, a new mythology, a new way to live in a world that tries its best to tear us apart, but for safety we know that we can “drag our comforter outside / sleep with arms flung open // all around our comrades / ants moths cockroaches caterpillars constellations.” Here, we hold everything the world dishes out. Here, in joining forces with the earth, we survive and we celebrate.”—Terry Ann Thaxton, author of Mud Song

I talk candidly about my interest in the supernatural, my exorcism, and the relationship between fairyland and the creative process, in this podcast with fiction writer Josh Woods. And C.S. Lewis scholar Amy Trogan also joins in the discussion with her insight into demonic possession in The Screwtape Letters.

Listen here:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/…/the-monster…/id1434115131

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0gRyzGOj3PQ8rYuQSMqq0A

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8US9zJPhJoPUI8ecS4PzNw

Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/…/aHR0cHM6Ly9qb3Nod29vZHNhd…

Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-monster-professor

iHeartRADIO: https://www.iheart.com/…/256-the-monster-professor…/

“Faun,” a play in verse, will be published by Plays Inverse in 2019. This manuscript is a monster, weighing in at 160 pages and 16,500 words (Don’t laugh, fiction writers–this is long for a poem!). After writing every day for six years, I managed to finish this book in the fall of 2016. At this point, I was only thinking of a book as an epic poem. I had low hopes of placing it somewhere due to the fact that almost all poetry book contests are limited to 80 pages (100 if you’re lucky). Angela Ball, one of the faculty members at USM where I was moonlighting as a VAP in 2016-17, suggested that I send it out as a play, and I’m lucky that I did! Tyler Crumrine (an excellent writer btw) from Plays Inverse was kind enough to give it a home.

The poem/play is composed of voices–human and nonhuman–that speak like the chorus of an ancient Greek play (rarely to each other, and always to the audience). One of the early problems with the piece was its ornate-ness. I tend to agree with Ezra Pound’s aphorism: “Beauty is aptness to purpose.” The manuscript was neither efficient nor lovely, which is why I decided to put it in a play format. At this point, I somehow didn’t register that the poem had become a play, only that I was making my manuscript more “apt.” So, in many respects “Faun” is still just a poem, although it sort of passes for a play, too. 

We’re still kicking around cover art ideas. I’m pretty bad at this, so I’m hoping Tyler comes through for me. I was thinking of something from Nijinsky’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” which was inspired by Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun” (Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune), which was inspired by the Mallarmé poem of the same name. My book brings the tradition full circle by making it a poem again (or so I hope), but from the nymphs’ perspectives. See (right), this really doesn’t work for a book cover. I need help!

Identity is fluid. Announce your name to an empty room and feel the word take on its own life, gathering momentum as it echoes back to you. You are not the name, and yet you are only the name. You can say it until it means nothing, until it is just a collection of sounds. Keep going and it becomes a mantra, a spell. It’s like that moment in a ghazal when you write your own name. The name is a mask. Words are shells waiting to be inhabited.

Larry Levis, in “Though His Name Is Infinite My Father Is Asleep,” writes that his father “went into his name, / He went into his name, & into / The way two words keep house,/ Each syllable swept clean / Again when you say them.” There is a formidable absence filling the names of the dead. A headstone is a mask of granite and a handful of letters that “once meant a whole world.” Levis writes that his father might have announced the act of dying as: “I’m going into my name.” The name, as the first thing we’re given when we’re born, also signals our mortality. Those “two words” are what will remain after we are gone.

I write a lot about transformation, both in Gog and in my manuscript-in-progress, Anti-Faun. I’d like to know how to transcend the past, how to tap into the part of the self that lies beyond a name, beyond our memories or experiences, that part of the self that seems to wink when you call out your own name saying: I am infinite; I am the air; I am the fire burning within the letters. I tell myself that no one can hurt me, has ever hurt me, because I’m made of something indestructible; I belong to the earth and sky. As Anti-Faun evolves, it continues to confound me. The main character embodies the voices of many different creatures, including trees, water, fire, animals, and insects. I use multiple mediums—poetry, prose, paintings, musical compositions—so that I might get closer to a transcendent space.

Thanks to a workshop by Linda Hall, a local Tallahassee artist and mask-maker, I’ve created the mask of a bear. The bear is a very important figure for me. When I was a girl, I was swimming far out into Lake Superior. My sadness was so great, it was like a physical wound. The water seemed very inviting, and if I kept swimming I would be pulled down into the cold. I wanted to be a gleaming pearl among the shipwrecks and agates. Then I saw a black bear on the shore. I felt pulled in by that bear, somehow saved by it. Although I know that’s impossible, you know, that a bear would give a shit about me or if it did, that it could change me at all. Yet, I felt that it woke me up. I’ve dreamt about it ever since. A blue, blue dream. I swim through an underwater tunnel, and the bear is standing on her hind legs. Her chest is hanging open and inside is a glowing blue heart. When I touch the heart, she swipes me in the face. I wake up. I die. I wake up. I die.

When I die, I’m new, transformed. Even in my work, I practice dying so that I can live. I’m not so sad anymore. My body is ink and paper, and yet it’s the fire and mystery inside my name. The energy that fills the mask is only limited by my imagination, by what I allow to become attached to the letters.

Night like a fling of crows / disperses and is gone. –Christian Wiman

I saw a red wave in the field and it hurt like it was my own blood.

In Hymnen an Die Nacht (Hymns to the Night), Novalis writes: Night became the mighty womb of revelations—the gods drew back into it—and fell asleep, only to go out in new and more splendid forms over the changed world (Higgins translation).

To start again. To sleep.

Darkness is made of colors. There are black shadows, fluttering lights of white, purple, grey, floating translucent balloons.

There are white flowers opening for bats.

Chrysalis. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Change. Becoming. Evolution. Mutation. Transanimation. Metempsychosis.

Another obsession like a vision of holes in the ceiling of a barn that has already collapsed. If I were a god, I would name them hayloft, tent, treehouse, shed.