Irregular Heartbeats
at the Park West
Wayne State University Press, 2024
Drawing on a depth of emotion, wit, and reverence for nature, this striking new collection captures the beautiful and often poignant complexities of the human experience. Russell Brakefield’s poems span American landscapes and personal experience, dropping down in music venues and dark barrooms, back alleys and suburbs, brightly lit galleries and lonely graveyards. Inspired by an assemblage of Americana and a litany of literary landmarks—from spiritual epiphanies at the Hemingway house to a reckoning with privilege in Lucille Clifton’s Baltimore—Brakefield explores how poetry can be influenced, propped up, and contorted by the American canon. Intimate reflections on family histories, hardship, and everyday life reveal the ways art and nature can lift us from grief and serve as lodestars in an increasingly uncertain world.
“An elegiac collection of close calls—in which the velvet rope between the living and the dead, the past and the present, permits easy passage—Russell Brakefield’s sonorously delicious Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West proclaims that ‘The sharper edge of nostalgia is knowing you barely got out alive.’ Brakefield wipes his ‘hand across death’s edge’ not just to illustrate some lamentation on loss but as a way to show how to celebrate it: ‘Give me the dead / tonight, troves / of them / clambering / up from the dirt.’ Souls on both sides of the celestial divide party and get down together in these pages. Boy, am I grateful for the invitation.”
—Tommye Blount, author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue
‘What’s the half-life of trauma?’ It’s a fitting question for a book which tenderly, thoughtfully explores how much our present selves are constituted by the haunting of our pasts, as well as the constant threat of our own mortality. Russell Brakefield is a poet we can trust with our existential fears.”
—Nicky Beer, author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes
“‘There, in the world,’ writes Brakefield, ‘was the language for everything.’ And the language with which Brakefield brings that world to us is piercingly inventive. Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West is a striking collection by a writer of considerable skill.”
—Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route
Russell Brakefield is the author of Field Recordings (Wayne State University Press), My Modest Blindness (Autofocus Books) and Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West (Wayne State University Press). He is the winner of the 2021 International 3-Day Chapbook Contest for his book Our Natural Satellite (Harvard Square Press). His writing has appeared in the Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Poet Lore, Crab Orchard Review, HAD, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He has received fellowships from the University of Michigan Musical Society, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Parks Department. He is Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.
