Contemporary Authors

• Holy Ghost City Lights (San Francisco, CA), 2017

• The Ordinary - 2013 Compline, Oakland, CA
• Antisocial Patience - 2015 Roof Books, New York, NY

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brazil_(poet)

  David Brazil (poet)
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  This article's lead section does not adequately summarize key points of its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. Please discuss this issue on the article's talk page. (January 2017)
  David Brazil is a poet, translator, and novelist based in California.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Selected works
  1.1 Books
  1.2 Poetry
  1.3 Periodicals
  2 Other activities
  3 References
  Selected works[edit]
  Books[edit]
  Spy Wednesday
  Meet Me Beneath the War Angels
  Poetry[edit]
  The Ordinary[1]
  Antisocial Patience[2]
  Holy Ghost[3]
  Periodicals[edit]
  Try![4]
  Hearts Desire Reading Series[5]
  Other activities[edit]
  Brazil works for the Faith Alliance for a Moral Economy as a co-pastor at a house-church in Oakland.[6]

• City Lights - http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100348950

  Format PDF Table of Contents and Two Poems from Holy Ghost
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  Holy Ghost
  City Lights Spotlight No. 15
  David Brazil

  Paperback - $15.95 $11.17 Save $4.78 (30%) Buy
  Description
  Reviews & News
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  Detailed info

  The third full-length collection from poet-scholar-activist David Brazil, Holy Ghost is a hymnal with secular burdens, poured from the mold of our actual life in common, sung against its limits. It seeks a way to find and build a soul together, and records the seekers' findings along the way, proposing love as our common human denominator. A record of the author's struggle to forge a relationship between two distinct vocations—one historical, as an activist (with Occupy Oakland, among other projects), and one spiritual, as he explores the path of radical Christian discipleship (in his life as a pastor)—Holy Ghost attempts to articulate an understanding of where class struggle meets the will of God.

  David Brazil is a poet, translator, and novelist. His books include The Ordinary and Antisocial Patience. With Kevin Killian, he edited the Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945-1985. From 2008 to 2011 he published over sixty issues of the seminal TRY! magazine with Sara Larsen. David co-pastors a house church in Oakland and works for social justice with the Faith Alliance for a Moral Economy. He's a Scorpio.

• Blog City Lights - http://www.blogcitylights.com/2012/04/19/david-brazil-on-poetry-for-the-people/

  QUOTED: "We invited people, and they came. They were writers we knew, they were people from the camp, they were people who were living on the streets downtown. They read poems from books, they read off their Iphones or out of tattered notebooks, they recited their rhymes and raps from memory, or they made stuff up on the spot."

  David Brazil on Poetry for the People
  by CITY LIGHTS posted on APRIL 19, 2012

  When Occupy Oakland established its first camp at Oscar Grant Plaza on October 10, 2011, even the most optimistic among us could hardly have expected the incredible efflorescence that resulted. Within twenty-four hours there was a functioning field kitchen, a supply tent, a medical station, and other facilities dedicated to providing for the needs of those in the camp.

  In my time at Occupy Oakland, I was very happy to help feed all the many folks in need of food, and I definitely washed a dish or two. But I also wanted to figure out : what, as a writer and “culture-worker,” can I contribute ?

  Many of us in the vibrant local community of writers & artists were asking the same questions. Our answers were diverse. We supported the Raheim Brown Free School & Library ; we worked on the daily Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette ; and, every Sunday, we gathered at the steps of 14th & Broadway for a “Poetry for the People” open mike.

  Here’s an extract from an invitation to the first reading (pictured above) :

  “RADICAL POETRY FOR THE PEOPLE!

 Dear friends, poets, appreciators of poetry, et al,

 this Sunday, October 16th, poets will be convening at Occupy Oakland (Frank Ogawa Plaza aka Oscar Grant Plaza, in Downtown Oakland) for a group reading of poems. Please come, bring a poem and join in!

 Please choose one piece from the revolutionary / radical tradition to read (e.g. brecht, baraka, lorca, di prima, etc. etc. etc. — please bring appropriate volumes to read from and to share).”

  We invited people, and they came. They were writers we knew, they were people from the camp, they were people who were living on the streets downtown. They read poems from books, they read off their Iphones or out of tattered notebooks, they recited their rhymes and raps from memory, or they made stuff up on the spot.

  I remember hearing work by Walt Whitman, Rob Halpern, George Oppen, Blake. I remember hearing the Book of Isaiah, Claude McKay, Aime Cesaire. I remember a woman I did not know and have never seen since read “To Althea, From Prison,” by Richard Lovelace.

  Our poetry gang met up & read poems every Sunday through December at the plaza, our numbers slowly dwindling in the face of the police repression that had shut down the plaza camp twice & then a nearby camp at 19th & Broadway. After that raid, on a rainy December morning, a comrade came up to us & asked “Are you reading poems to the streets?” We were.

  When I sent out a note to friends announcing that December 18th’s “Poetry for the People” would be the last installment before an indefinite hiatus pending future developments, Diane di Prima quickly wrote back to remind me “there is never a last Poetry for the People”. As things have gotten tougher through the spring, I’ve found that reminder very useful.

  In less than a month it will be May 1, International Worker’s Day, a day on which Occupy Oakland and others have called for an international general strike. Many people I’ve talked to are both excited about the day and uncertain as to what will actually happen. One thing I feel I can be sure about : in the streets of Oakland, anyway, there will be poets, putting their queer shoulders to the wheel.

  ——————————————————————–

  David Brazil was born in New York and lives in Oakland. His most recent chapbook is Mass of the Phoenix : A Mina Loy Portal (Trafficker, 2012). A full-length collection, ECONOMY, is forthcoming from Compline Press.

• Compline - http://compline.tumblr.com/authors/davidbrazil

  David Brazil was born in New York and lives in California. His publications include The Ordinary (Compline), The Book Called Spring (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), Spy Wednesday (TAXT), Meet Me Beneath the War Angels (OMG!), Orphica (Lew Gallery), Aevum (Vigilance Society), Mass of the Phoenix : A Mina Loy Portal (Trafficker) and To Romans (Compline). With Kevin Killian, he edited the Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater : 1945 - 1985.

  Along with his partner Sara Larsen, David produced over sixty issues of the xerox periodical TRY!, featuring the work of dozens of contemporary writers. Part of the editorial collective which produced the daily Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette during Occupy Oakland, he now works with the Bay Area Public School to promote free & radical education. He makes his living as a bookseller.

• Openspace - https://openspace.sfmoma.org/author/davidbrazil/

  David Brazil
  David Brazil was born in New York and lives in California. His third book, Holy Ghost, is forthcoming from City Lights. He co-pastors a house church and works for the resistance.

  Photo credit: Suzanne Stein.

QUOTED: "a clever patois" "captivating juxtapositions."
"Brazil's experimentation with language and form doesn't always work, but his free verse fulfils his stated aims."

Holy Ghost
Publishers Weekly. 264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Holy Ghost

David Brazil. City Lights, $15.95 trade paper (100p) ISBN 978-0-87286-714-7

In his third collection, Brazil (Antisocial Patience) meditates on the earthly and the divine, exploring what distinctions separate and unite these spheres. The eponymous spirit is not a deity or celestial being, but the holy presence he recognizes in himself and others. Which is not to say there isn't a God present; there is, appealed to as "the vanished underlying/ father we are waiting for," but he shares the stage with a bravely benevolent humankind attempting to throw off the yoke of oppression. In addition to such influences as Ginsberg and Whitman, Brazil invokes the troubadour spirit of Woody Guthrie in bursts of musical refrains, as in "One Dust Song," with lines like "day is short/ and dust is long/ and right is right/ and wrong is wrong." Part of Brazil's worldview seems to be the perception that we are living in philosophically meager times, a new Dust Bowl of spiritual and moral poverty. He means to galvanize dissent, to encourage "righteous action rhetoric can't break." Through a clever patois, Brazil mixes elevated and colloquial language, benediction and idiom, to create captivating juxtapositions: "in the splendid garden of the lambent forms, I'm/ about to ask y'all a question." Brazil's experimentation with language and form doesn't always work, but his free verse fulfils his stated aims. (May)

• Prairie Schooner
  http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/pnr/may-26-2017
  Word count: 66

  Holy Ghost by David Brazil
  [Paperback] City Lights Publishers, 118 pp., $15.95

  The third full-length collection from poet-scholar-activist David Brazil records his struggle to forge a relationship between two distinct vocations—street activist in Occupy Oakland and its aftermath, and unorthodox pastor exploring the path of radical Christian discipleship. Holy Ghost pulls toward the place where class struggle meets the will of God.

• Shearsman Books
  http://www.shearsman.com/ws-blog/post/1010-david-brazil---the-ordinary
  Word count: 1374

  QUOTED: "vernacular usage will come up against, or alongside, words in ancient Greek, theological concepts, Marxist economics, records of conversation-as-community, sometimes within lines of each other; for Brazil, these are all part of the process, part of the field of economy which is his field of study, his social situation."

  David Brazil, The Ordinary

  (Oakland, CA: Compline, 2012 (reprinted 2014). Paperback, 230 pp. $15.00)

  Reviewed by David Grundy

  First off, what’s striking about this book in particular is its particular register, in terms both of tone and of formal practice – the two, I think, not really separable. At one point, Brazil writes, “my prosody’s from here” – here being, primarily, his home-town, Oakland, CA, whose environmental pressures and socialities are figured through a highly-developed auto-didactic acquaintance with ancient languages, and with political, economic and theological history, and through the detritus of language and material out of which the poetry’s shaped.

  The Ordinary as a whole is in six sections: in a note of acknowledgment, Brazil thanks Michael Cross – whose publications, through Compline Editions and, previously Atticus/Finch truly are some of the most beautifully crafted objects being made at present; and without whom “this book, both as concept and object, would never have come into existence.” The first four sections consist of shorter poetic fragments, often including crossings-out and corrections in pen which sometimes radically alter the shape of the original, type-written poem; the sixth is a metrical and idiosyncratically modernized translation of St Paul’s Letter to Romans, the foundation, according to a tradition of interpretation stretching from Jacob Taubes to Badiou and Agamben, of a politically-emancipatory theology predicated on the rejection of law: whether this law be that of the Torah, the rule of the Roman empire (predicated precisely against the Jewish people), or of law more generally, as instrument of class and State oppression. The section entitled ‘Economy’, parts of which were previously published by Little Red Leaves Press, manifests what is often a more overtly essayistic process, taking the form, in a mixture of prose and poetry, of a kind of diary of thought and hope. Its approach the notion of ‘economy’ comes from various theoretical angles and as a journal-like working-through of the practice of writing itself. Individual poems are dated in pen and written on scraps of paper found on the streets of Oakland – advertisements for church services, housing forms, surgical procedures – which are the detritus of those so poorly provided for within the management of economy as that house which is most certainly not a home (oikos), suffering “the deleterious effects upon body, psyche and interpersonal relation” that are “the life of oikos considered generally”. These are the daily structuring violences that at times manifest themselves in images of extreme and direct – often gendered – suffering: “stop the girl / kid’s mouth with a cock / lest she utter an / irrevocable curse.” Here, nonetheless, is the possibility of a curse that can’t be called back, against tormenters, against the “retro hetero werewolf […] dual hetero foil to your head”: the possibility of that resistance necessary for survival.

  As Brazil puts it in a group interview for Bomb magazine: “All waste also actually talks. Being struck in the face by history it has no choice. Economy was an attempt to discover the contingent prosody inside of the intersection of objects, days, a space (Oakland) and myself.” These scraps of non-human detritus also find their analogue in those human beings symbolically and materially cast aside within economic processes. St Paul’s “we have become the refuse of the world, the off-scouring of all things until now” (Corinthians 4:13); the wretched of the earth, the proletariat, the “preterite part” excluded from the fatalist-Calvinist ‘elect’ of capital. Economy’s method, then, is a process of composition by incrementation and erasure, as in the ‘redacted’ parts prevalent in the first sections of the book as a whole. “[W]hat congealed / to force his pro-/duct […] forms / a house of waste” (p.): the transformation of living substances to dead ones, the substitution of material labour and labourers by what Alfred Sohn-Rethel would call the ‘real abstraction’ of exchange, that which is given material form by its unconscious, lived basis. These are theological, or, let’s say, metaphysical concepts which are lived by and through: “we’re all walking around with theology in our mouths”; “Cash, I told Dana’s, a negative eucharist.” Against them are posed models of polis which instantiate different models of law, of ethics, of economy: the nomos that must underwrite and, perhaps, reconfigure, oikos – “the ethical body must / incessantly repeat / the spiritual act of its upsurge, / must always be reborn, / must always recall itself / to its name and its / freedom” (TO, p.lxxii).

  Such plurality is manifested also in tone, which I mentioned at the start of the review – vernacular usage will come up against, or alongside, words in ancient Greek, theological concepts, Marxist economics, records of conversation-as-community, sometimes within lines of each other; for Brazil, these are all part of the process, part of the field of economy which is his field of study, his social situation. Once again, “my prosody’s from here.” Or: “there’s no other place from which to write what we must / say than FROM INSIDE THIS SHITTY LIFE.” (p.LL)

  This quite unique approach to prosody, source material and tone is something Brazil shares with the work of his close compadres Evan Kennedy and Jackqueline Frost – with whose Terra Firmament and The Antidote, respectively, The Ordinary has been presented as a kind of trilogy of shared concerns. All three books emerge out of the political organisation and activism which reached a peak during the blockade and otherwise of Occupy Oakland, and all emerge as a record which must in some way reckon with the ultimate defeat of that movement, “in the caesurae between struggles” figuring its lessons and retaining its hope. “hope pours forth / from out the fault, the / one at uproar / withinside itself” (p.LL). So faith, however racked and split, is never lost, as it sometimes is in instantiations of a militant poetics, in poetry itself, in the unique work that it can do. Poetry here does not end up in ironized self-recrimination, nor is it exaggerated in propagandistic claims that can never be lived up – what Brazil in a letter to Thom Donovan from December 2011 calls “the crust of reified sloganeering and narrative claims trying to make a fit matter for the spectacle”. As Brazil writes in a letter to fellow Bay Area poet Alli Warren published at Donovan’s OTHER LETTERS project: “It continues to be revolutionary to remember, to insist, to stand up for. To be an agent of a very fragile cultural transmissions.”

  The sixth and final section of The Ordinary, ‘To Romans’, is the culmination of the book in that its concern is with law –“law law law law, what’s law, what’s the law, what’s the relevant law” (p.cxxiii) – and with the universal. In an earlier poem considering the role of the judge, Brazil moves from a local instantiation of that role – the judge from “Iowa” who “reads thrillers” on his break. The comic disparity between the human manifestation of the structural role (Brazil has to “ask Lord” what that judge does in their spare time) leading onto a broader consideration of ‘judgement’ as such, in which “every day” might be “judgement day”, the instantiation of a practical ethics through daily action and negotiation. So that his poetry is supremely ethical, where ethics must and can only be constituted in ongoing contingent negotiation and struggle: full, as outlined above, of detritus, waste that speaks back, “waste as muse”. The Ordinary itself, then, is not exactly ‘social realism’, nor is it a celebration of the magic of the unjust order that is, but the strenuous hope for its transformation and overthrow, “the future […] legible in the lineaments of the present [which] mingles with those liberatory shards of past history whose light blazes to us all across time with the message of a liberated humanity”, in the endlessly complex figuration of how this might manifest itself in practice.

• Poetry Foundation
  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/04/being-happy-with-the-ordinary-part-1
  Word count: 4091

  QUOTED: "With its evocation of a life lived in poetry, its familiar dailiness, the presence of chance and change, the feeling of development in the thinking of the writer, it combines the pleasure of the author’s journal with the joys of well thought out prosody and very particular word choice."
  "The cross-outs are many in this piece and present, as they do throughout this section, a highly edited, even redacted, text that slows one down a bit as one tries to read some of the more legible crossed out parts and wonders about others. The inclusion of the edits causes the editing to mean. Thinking through what those meanings might be becomes part of one’s slow movement through the poem."

  Laura Moriarty

  Because I wanted there to be a book by David Brazil, having read his poems and chapbooks with interest, as well as the magazine Try, edited with Sara Larsen, and participated in a year-long reading group at one point, I was happy with The Ordinary before I even saw it. When I did see it I was happier still because of the intriguing religiosity and printerly quality of image on the cover (which is from a medieval codex called "A Garden of Delights”). I like it when people brought up in the West exploit their own traditions and this one is nicely done. The saints, saviors, thieves, graves, action of reaching up or praying, mythical creatures and mothers of god suggest to me not so much delight as a range of Judeo-Christian themes that bring to mind the vicissitudes of personal, family and work life and the politics of everything. Or, more accurately, the politics of everything in this book emerges from the strong sense of community and activism that is true of both David Brazil and his work and which are, in turn, evoked by the human and divine dramas suggested by the cover image. The presence and cultivation of the poetic and other communities, spreading outward with a will to being very inclusive, is pervasive in this book, one could even say foundational. Like the Greek text printed in silver in which the cover images seem embedded, the polis is both frame and ground in this work. The community functions as reader, subject, collaborator, and witness.

  Names of people appear on the colophon page which, after giving a timing of 2008-2011 for the composition of the poems in this book and including the address of the author in case you want to write or “stop by…,” mentions Michael Cross, whose Compline produced this lushly designed volume, and who is noted as one without whom “this book, both as concept and object, would never have come into existence.” David thanks Michael and we thank him again for the pleasure to be had in this text. It is a great source of happiness when the ideal publisher steps up to help put together and design the ideal book by some lucky author. Luck or fate is a theme that will appear with some frequency in these poems once we start reading them. But, now, we come to the facing page, the table of contents, which presents the first of the torn things we are to encounter. This page includes an image of a torn piece of paper, in white on the black background with the title, “the ordinary,” along with another torn piece listing the six sections including the page numbers in Roman numerals. These numerals are handwritten and only the perspicacious reader is likely to notice them. This use of Roman numerals for pagination has not been, for me, among the many sources of satisfaction in the book, but they do not distract too much. If here we turn the page, we find two torn sections from the cover image, with the title of the first section, “i. (kairos)” on another image of a torn piece of paper. Turn again to find the first numbered page, III, and a door that brings to mind ancient doors as well as the convention of the door in art and collage going back at least to, well, forever. I am thinking here mostly of evocations of tomb doors that are perhaps from the time of the eighteenth century French invasion of Egypt and other gestures of discovery that were part colonial, part archaeological (if there is a difference between those two things.) The figure in the picture appears to be wearing a fez or is it a top hat? That the image comes from a postcard David bought at the Art Institute of Chicago doesn’t explain much or explains a lot in that it shows the random and ordinary sources for these visual elements. The title of this section “(kairos)” with its interesting parenthesis (consistent throughout the section titles) and with the meaning of “right or opportune moment,” invites us, finally, into what seems to be a poetic diary.

  The poetic diary is among my favorite forms. With its evocation of a life lived in poetry, its familiar dailiness, the presence of chance and change, the feeling of development in the thinking of the writer, it combines the pleasure of the author’s journal with the joys of well thought out prosody and very particular word choice. These qualities are all present in “(kairos)” along with the other first thing you notice which is its blot-outs, corrections and generally taped together appearance. The poems here seem to be not “final” but contingent on whether reader and author can agree that these experiments have worked. There is a casual quality to this section belied by the careful wording and, in fact, visible editing. The pieces are all dated like journal entries but without the year. (They date from 2008.) We seem to encounter them mid-way from their start as something like a diary to their final existence as poems. They don’t settle and we are pleased to participate in the on-going account of their alteration. With the writer, we skip the extra words, become more concise, get rid of repetitions and or parts that have “gone threadbare,” not including that phrase, which was retained in a poem that asserts ritual while questioning it, identifies genre as a subject and ends with a line in Sanskrit from the Heart Sutra deeply familiar to those who have gone out from their Judeo Christian roots to Buddhist practice.

  9/28

  wedding

  gone threadbare

  to undo genre that we are

  in this country, or

  the mantra

  gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi sava

  Moriarty2

  The cross-outs are many in this piece and present, as they do throughout this section, a highly edited, even redacted, text that slows one down a bit as one tries to read some of the more legible crossed out parts and wonders about others. The inclusion of the edits causes the editing to mean. Thinking through what those meanings might be becomes part of one’s slow movement through the poem. I found it a bit distracting and destabilizing but in a pleasing way. My access to this particular poem, due to my own Buddhist practice, and some experience with the genre of weddings, was relatively simple. However, access is not always easy. The image of the door I mentioned before is that of a closed one and yet (see below): “behold I stand at door and knock”.

  Moriarty3

  This question of being slowed or distracted brings us to the difficulty and erudition that are some of the particular qualities of Brazil’s work. I thought it was Poundian and, checking with David, found that in fact , this allusiveness is related to his love for the work of Ezra Pound and, I would say, his having in common with Pound a multi-linguality of reading and regard for a wide historical matrix of meaning and cultural context that he wants consistently to include in his work. I make no excuse for it, as David does not and has no reason to. However, it is a challenge to look up a lot of words and phrases as you read, if you choose to read in that way, which is much richer than if you don’t. It is a task for the reader few writers seem to demand these days. Being able to do it online makes it easier but this is not where it comes from with Brazil who, as a bookseller and collector, is all about the material book and is constantly studying ancient languages and traditions—very often with members of the local community and usually at the Bay Area Public School which, it is worth noting, is an arts, political and educational organization in Oakland that grew out of the 2011 Occupy movement and already existing desires for a community space. Brazil helped to found what could be thought of as a sort of “anti-institution” which brings into very active practice his and others’ commitment to community life and thought.

  our people is our people
  i.e. cash is not the vector

  a politics of sufficiency of utterance in this milieu
  aint going to fucking cut it

  all which has been fastened may be loosened

  all that is solid melts into
  us

  sown into the instruments of time

  ducats thy monad
  pli selon pli

  “cash is not the vector” seems a practical and accurate sentiment in general (and applies specifically to the Bay Area Public School where everything is determinedly free.) This freedom of things and people is central to the Brazil position which tends toward political and spiritual insurrection. Here I am paraphrasing a comment he made in an interview about the writings of Paul of Tarsus that I believe applies equally to David’s thinking. We are next lead into Marx with “all that is solid melts into/ us.” The segue from biblical to Marxian allusion is typical of Brazil. I should have recognized this one right away but had to look it up, as often happens, at least to me. I find that each time I look something up the word or phrases in questions morph into the well-know Blakean expansion of a moment into seven thousand years so the effort becomes a pleasure while remaining an effort. David Brazil requires a lot of work on the part of the reader and/or a lot of knowledge. As I have already mentioned there is no reason to question that demand but, talking with David, I find that he is aware of how such density might limit his readership to people eager to read in this allusive, historical way. The issue is the degree to which one might want to write for readers who don’t have the inclination to read this way. As a writer I like to stay with my reader on the page and so tend not to allude very often but then sometimes I do allude and like it when others make that gesture. As a friend, I would say it is so entirely how David seems to live every moment of his life it is hard to see how he could write otherwise.

  The other, larger point, is to notice that for a Marxian to be as religious as Brazil is notable, though, after years of liberation theology, not unique, but there it is. David Brazil’s religiosity is not limited to one tradition but definitely pervades his work and thinking and is actively expressed in his life. There are here issues of belief, of faith and philosophical and political thinking, that are fairly immense in scope. Many of us in the poetic community I have been evoking are determined materialists and atheists but some are not. I think these positions are rarely argued or even mentioned. Perhaps because none of us could imagine that anyone believes in God or a deity or the divine—but belief exists at various levels. And of course there are lines in the thinking of all the writers in question, believer or not, in Marx or God, which are reflected in their poetics. The topic would require a separate essay but, suffice it to say, is operative in reading Brazil’s work.

  The last page of “(kairos)” reminded me of Robert Smithson’s “Heap of Language” and, though it is really just a simple rectangle of writing, evoked, for me, the tomb pictured on the facing page. The piece is hand-written and though I could see it was a definition, I had trouble reading the word being defined so I emailed David about it. In his nicely complex and bookish way, he replied “the word is KAIROS, in Greek capitals (the capital 'rho' looks like an English capital P and the final 'sigma' looks like a capital E, otherwise the letters correspond to the Roman alphabet), as defined by the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon of ancient Greek & traced out by me on vellum. The 'Liddell' of the lexicon was the father of Alice Liddell, of Wonderland fame.”

  Moriarty4

  Moving out of “(kairos)” into “(election), “ written around the time of the election of 2008, we find ourselves in the same basic forms as the first section in the sense that they are dated entries edited into poems in a way that remains visible to the reader as blotting, crossouts etc. They are also presented in two columns in what might be 9 point type so that poetry crowds the page. The poems of “(election)” are longer and if you know David (or if you don’t) you find moments of personal history that might remind you of your own life. This focus on the idea of “election” and what that might mean in a writer whose work is intensely nuanced by religious considerations (and belief) drove me back to a talk that Brazil gave at the first Poetics of Labor Conference, in 2010, focusing on senses of vocation. Election and vocation in the Brazil sense seem similar—possibly to be on a continuum. In the talk David quotes a particular passage by Saint Paul in Greek and then Latin and then translates it as “Each one in the calling in which he was called that same calling let him remain.” (from First Corinthians, 7:20) The talk thinks through the fact of being a writer and also a proletarian and how or whether these designations can be commensurate. Unlike “vocation,” “election” can be thought of as a ritual, a secular equivalent of a coronation (not necessarily a positive thing in the Judeo-Christian tradition.) It is the fact of being chosen or, again, called.

  This election may involve more suffering and responsibility than anything else but does, at times, involve the populace. After the image of the body rising from a tomb taken from the front cover print, the second image that confronts the reader in “(election)” is a detail of the body of the sovereign made up of the people from the well-known frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil by the printmaker Abraham Bosse. These mostly faceless people (they are all turned toward the sovereign though they are already part of him) seem unhappily captured and incorporated into this autocratic body politic. The poems here are haunted by death and debt. There is doubt. There are a terrific number of cross-outs so that the work seems to be unwriting itself right before your eyes. The second column of a piece on page XLIII speaks to the atmosphere that pervades “(election)” as well as to the prosodic pleasure to be had here.

  possible horizon’s

  innovation of a subject in relation to
  what once was god
  what now is cash & debt

  the king’s head hangs in tree
  a space devoid of law

  where grace had not
  discernable place

  that dogma fails

  “o tome, o tomb, I hum a hym
  to home, to whom”

  In spite of the high level of erudition and even occasional opacity, there is a great clarity of meaning and passion in this Gethsemane-like section. You don’t have to be a scholar to get that the “silent void through which/ vocation floods” might not always be a good place to be. Of course for the reader, as always, the difficulty faced by the protagonist and offered up by the poet as a part of his journey is a pleasure to experience and there is a great deal of fun with prosody to be had here. Part of Brazil’s prosodic approach is to work through the sound of the word which typically leads to an assertion of its etymology. Often the source language will slide into the picture and there might then be a rhyme or a pun or other sound-based way of moving forward. Often there are bits of conversation. There might be a quote from an ancient text or from a headline. The line might be a complaint or cry of sadness but the music of it carries you. The activity of making one’s way through these densities brings us back to my happiness theme because there simply isn’t a way to make me happier as a reader than difficulty which resolves into delightful song-like clarity. The last page of “(election)” which is the last part of a three page poem demonstrates this artfulness, simplicity and explanation:

  Moriarty5

  The third section “(vierges)” begins with the image of a young woman wearing a dress and a wimple by an engraver called Martin Schongauer. The print is presented as a Xeroxed image against a gray Xeroxed background. She prepares us for a text in which the feminine appears in relation to the citizenship being examined and proposed. Each poem occupies one page and is not left- justified. The material of this particular section—both in its typing and in its reproduction as image rather than as words that are typeset—is consistent with the first two sections. Here there is a noticeably inconsistent leading (distance between lines) that would cause you to have your typewriter repaired if there are still people who could do that and you weren’t going for just that effect. In this case, the lines wander intentionally with meanings in tow.

  Still, because there are no visible editings or blottings you begin the section with the sense that it will be smooth sailing. The way through these poems, however, remains nicely oblique. Without the dailiness of the journal-like pieces or as much vernacular language, I found less linearity and a more meditative way of presenting the matter, “(vierges),” which is not so much virginity, the literal translation, as, again, citizenship, particularly as it relates to what Brazil called, in an email exchange we had about this section, “the question of the feminine.” This is a question not often addressed by male writers in a way that does not characterize this feminine as a lover, wife, sister or mother, so its presence here is, for me, a welcome one. As a “subject gendered male” living with the heritage of many patriarchal empires that are both actual and conceptual and which include the current one, Brazil sets out to “perceive and demonstrate” what it might mean to live as one “of the vanquished/ with a short or long ‘true life’/and role of arbiter/emended words/having a common assumption/o’er took with envy’s storm/called ‘invisible being’/ appealing to isonomy/--unjust judgments—“ (LXIV) “Isonomy” is “the possession of equal political and legal rights by all citizens of a state or equality before the law. The degree to which such a thing is entirely utopian is underlined by David’s comment about this section is that it has “in common with other sections of the book a concern with perceiving and demonstrating the strata of civic constitution -- in order that we can imagine an alternative ‘step by step, into the sacred world.’”

  (vierges) ends with an image by the same artist of a young woman facing in the opposite direction. “iv (descorts)” begins with a print of an old man, bearded, with a crucifix before him and a rosary hanging behind. The image is from a study for an engraving of Jerome by Albrecht Dürer. The first poem in this section begins on the left instead of the right page, suggesting the saint is the first poem. Again, we have reproduced typescript which includes edits. The word “posits” appears (with a blot between the “s” and the “I”) as a verse and below it in a square of Xeroxed gray. One is immediately put in mind of Jack Spicer’s iconic Heads of the Town Up to the Aether with its upper level sections in black ink and its lower, commentary sections in gray. Brazil’s work here asserts a much more gnomic presence, to use a term David favors and by which I mean brief, allusive and understated. So we have something posited here by “descorts,” a form and genre of Occitan lyric poetry that was discordant. My reading is that it is prosody itself that posits or proposes but when we ask what is posited we find a verse “heaven/of the/ fixed stars” cancelled by a very stellar, hand drawn “X” that brings us to Dante’s Eighth level of paradise and to the constellative impulse to which these highly prosodized syntactic units (to use a term I invented for the contemporary anti-lyric) are subject.

  What is apparently in mind in the pieces in this section is first the urge to experiment with prosody so wildly as to push the limits of meaning well past what might seem wise and yet retain a sense that these words should be arranged in just this way at this time on the page as you find them. It is an activity familiar to me and I think this kind of practice requires the also urgent need to communicate where, as here, the matter to be communicated is a sense of the ordinary life of love and death, and the politics of scarcity and catastrophe, both in the world and in the heart.

  THERE

  Is a transmission
  that is catastrophe

  circumcised

  heart

  Moriarty6

  This is the first of many appearances of the phrase “circumcised heart”—one, as I read it, that has been cut around, surrounded, altered according to an old ritual that remains current. The phrase causes religion, identity, gender, sexuality, love and belief to meet in a way that changes as it is used and read. I assumed David had invented it until I noticed in some reading I was doing a source in Deuteronomy 30:6 as well as Romans 2:29. The concept in a religious sense seems to be that actual circumcision doesn’t trump what is called circumcision of the spirit. Again, this seems to have to do with who is chosen, what they are chosen to do or be and how they might know that.

  “iii (descorts)” ends with a full page of intensely sounded lines that source various languages, taking the form, at times, of syllables or phonemes “ret,” “wert,” “hyle” that don’t immediately mean to the common reader though there is a kind of throughline in these words, phrases and fragments suggestive of a sensual and possibly Oedipal context that might involve licking. The last line of the first section “vegy/asafetida/lickerisher/potate” is followed by the lines in the Xeroxed square in what I have thought of as the commentary section which, in this case, is “avalo/kiteshvara” with underlinings ( suggesting perhaps ital). This phrase is a Sanskrit term which can be thought of in English as something like “Lord who looks down on the world,” a highly revered Bodhisattva who in some traditions is said to have made a vow to postpone his own enlightenment until he assists all sentient beings to that state. This Christ-like figure is one of many in The Ordinary.
  Originally Published: April 2nd, 2015

• Entropy
  https://entropymag.org/love-law-wind-a-review-of-antisocial-patience-by-david-brazil/
  Word count: 2099

  QUOTED: "This book does not stand back. This book is a call: a litany of petitions, attentions, confessions, ringing in the ears sometimes gently like a bell—other times climactically blasting through the brain with a trumpeting surround."

  LOVE LAW WIND: A REVIEW OF ANTISOCIAL PATIENCE BY DAVID BRAZIL
  written by Guest Contributor February 25, 2016
  Alana Siegel
  antisocial patience by David Brazil
  Roof Books, 2015
  121 pages – Roof / Amazon

  My contemplation of antisocial patience is mirrored by the measure of a year. I began thinking about this book last Easter, and now, as Easter nears, I’m finishing this review. I bring up contemplation, Easter, and a year, to emphasize what makes this book crucial as a study—how to make time holy—and by holy I do not only mean the time reserved for holy days (though I mean that time too)—I mean how to make all time holy, wholly lived in, unlike the calendar we’re used to which mechanizes, compartmentalizes, and controls time—I mean how to invoke the full power of human lives from the inside out, through the concentration of private, personal reflection, carried over into poetry, carried over into communities, carried over into—but antisocial patience, as its title lays down like an arrow into the ear of the reader, stays with and draws out the gravity and necessity of the first act—sustained thought in solitude—endangered in the current climate of surveillance and social media in all of its varieties—how to command your own interiority distinct from every possible forum and participation encouraging you otherwise—a poem as the weight of your insides, a talisman of spirit, the most radical and enduring of belongings, always other than the orders or affinities, popular or reigning. “In the War they made a Celestial Cave,” said Robert Duncan. David Brazil says:

  Give your thanks
  while you have breath,
  For you too count,
  in the tally of death.

  Whatever your face
  whatever your rank
  the work of this world’s
  to think and to thank.

  This book does not stand back. This book is a call: a litany of petitions, attentions, confessions, ringing in the ears sometimes gently like a bell—other times climactically blasting through the brain with a trumpeting surround. So this book exists symphonically, conducting a range of tonalities, while it maintains a tone that is ruthlessly direct—a guide, tried directly on oneself through the writer’s willingness and testimony, in how to kindle a dialogue with oneself, and in so doing, figure out how to see oneself, account for the inventory of one’s actions of the past, so one’s performance of the future is undergone with added knowing—taking action seriously, and making hyper-real the incessant self-assessment needed to excavate and so establish a lived vision of individual responsibility. Throughout the 18 poems included, the writer beckons with self-reflexive questions that are then offered over to the reader in the form of direct address. In the 3rd poem, Brazil writes:

  choke on light,
  choke on limit,
  choke on lack but
  ask yourself twice :
  have you done right ?
  have you done acts ?
  did you fight the good fight ?
  was that shit wack ?
  did I fight in
  ephesus for this ?
  why was I born
  between the shit and the piss ?
  was paul right ?
  if so what then ?
  i wonder if I might
  see my family again.
  everything dies,
  that’s a fact,
  maybe what dies
  someday comes back.

  This book works in resonance. “everything dies,/that’s a fact,/maybe what dies/someday comes back,” are not only the lines at the end of this stanza, but also the lyrics found in Bruce Springsteen’s song “Atlantic City.” With “Paul” and “Ephesus” mentioned a few lines earlier, an echo chamber is constructed between the figure of the New Testament and the closeness of the modern lyric. Throughout the text, lines from other authors, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, John Wieners, Alice Notley, and others whom I have yet to find, weave subtly and sometimes nearly invisibly within Brazil’s entwining verse. In addition, words such as “nathless” “sovran” and “hath” plus other diction hearkening to an archaic usage, appear throughout the text, and it could be curious to the reader why such language is chosen. My hypothesis is that words which are as common for us to hear today such as “shit” or “piss” are mingled with these other “archaic” choices, as a kind of recipe, and a sort of an omen, and a hint leading to an aspect of the human condition inside the truth of how language changes.

  David Brazil is one of my good friends. I feel it important in this moment to provide a lens into an activity of David’s life which I have shared in, to contextualize how the book investigates its forms of expression. David studies languages. He has studied Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Occitan, and many others. I bring this to mind to address how words and phrases, which to the reader’s ear catch as unfamiliar, are introduced into the composition as a natural outflow of his ongoing learning. Wittgenstein is often quoted as stating, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” David heeds this axiom by expanding the horizon of his poetry to include language seemingly distant. In my opening paragraph I state that this book is an exercise in “how to make time holy.” In the paragraph above, I wager that the presence of words rendered archaic “reveal an aspect of the human condition inside the truth of how language changes.” What is this “aspect”? What is this “truth”? To take the wager further, I ask: Is there an underlying ethic in “expanding the horizon of poetry”?

  I entitled this review “Love Law Wind” because it struck me how each word appears in this book with salient frequency. I intuited that these three words must form a bond of the book’s core. But as I looked through to verify my intuition, I found that “wind” does not appear as actively as “love” or “law.” And I found that “song” shows up far more than “wind,” so it made sense to change the title to “Love Law Song.” But my ear wouldn’t let me. I inquired into my diffidence as an added angle of interrogation into the heart of the book. What were the etymologies, the origins of “love” and “law,” but now, more pronouncedly, what were the differences or likenesses in the etymologies of “song” and wind”?

  In looking up the etymologies of these two words, I felt initiated into the paths of the words’ permutations of pronunciation and persistence of their meaning throughout time, but I still was not satisfied. I decided to seize antisocial patience itself, and cite key moments in which “song” and “wind” and “love” and “law” appear, to understand the mystery of their relation, so perhaps this book. David writes in the 1st poem:

  Snow as an eastern law as a sequence of
  nows, that rushes chill thru
  every deme, as bright as
  attestation so your song wont
  want for rigor, poured as it is
  from law of the sky thru
  form it us you happen to
  be on any given day, as it
  chance, assuming you are form.

  At the top of the following page David writes, “But it is in the time that you/ have shape you’ll chance to be the/conduit of song.” In the immediately ensuing stanza, “desolated ground of we/had suffered song now past its.” A couple of lines later, “a wrench in laws disbarring/all of our affections so.”

  I decided to act irresponsibly divinatory, and proceeded to open the book at random, seeing if any one of the four words appeared.

  “I/crave the law, I” “‘Your song, what does it know?’” “the wind is infinite/my predicate/my predicate” “Love, to give law unto his subject hearts/hath wove a song is made of days”

  In performing these random openings, I seemed to be layered in a sequence. I understood these four words less as words and more as powers: of the human heart, of civic orders, of elemental intelligence, and poetic utterance, and that the meanings of these words in this book, and outside of it, are not isolate because the powers are not isolate, but interpenetrate. We are used to hearing and experiencing “law” as the unwanted order, as the realm of police and prisons and injustice, even though it purports to be the place of justice. In antisocial patience it as if a new dream of law is enacted, where “law” is “love” and “law” is “song” and “law” is “wind” and what rules the world is a moral force, and a natural act, fundamentally other than what we undergo day to day.

  Last Easter, when this book was fresh in my hands, David invited me, as well as 7 or so other friends to go to the church he goes to every Sunday. We all trickled in and found each other, shared a beautiful service and afterwards, a bountiful brunch. Most of us then spent the day together and as evening set in, we went to dinner. When leaving the restaurant, each of our eyes gravitated towards a sentence on a man’s sweatshirt poignantly in touch with the subject of our day. Written on it was, “God is Love.” We asked him where he got his sweatshirt, and his answer was slightly mumbled. We looked to each other a little clumsily as he then went out the door. “Did he say Google?” I asked the table. David answered, “No, he said Goodwill,” and I only realize now the depth of relief registered in me then—that the provenance of the garment of “God is Love” was “Goodwill,” not “Google,” that “love” and “God” were found in the will towards goodness, not an empty search for information and the culture that comes with it. Though I am admittedly still haunted by the closeness of the sounds of those two words—how they sound so similar, yet embody such opposite ontologies. It is this phenomenon of the paradoxical and mysterious relationship between language and being this book lives in and puzzles through—finding out through diction and meter, particularly rhyme, how sound alters sense, configures meaning and belief.

  Ezra Pound said an “epic” is a “poem including history.” antisocial patience feels epic to me, but I replace “history” with “company”–“a poem including company.” There is a friendliness that is vast and vital. Invitations into the words of other authors slip easily between what you or I might say on any given day. Words in other languages are not intimidating but welcoming, into other worlds, other times and places accessed simply by the reading of a word. And a world internal to the poems, not yet made, but imagined, reaches out to the reader with the warmth of dream, the lullaby and innocence of life alone in song. And to finally answer my question posed earlier, and echo what I state above—“Is there an underlying ethic in “expanding the horizon of poetry”? My answer is “Yes. Company.” The expansion serves to quell the fear of one’s mortality. Purportedly, one of the rites of the Orphic mysteries was the utterance of the words, “I am a son of Earth and starry heaven.” A feeling of being completely at home in the cosmos underlies this reading—antisocial patience is a searching out for lost being, or in other words, lost belonging, lost time, lost words, and the happiness of having found them in the moment of a poem singing.

  HeadshotAlana Siegel is the author of Archipelago (Station Hill Press, 2013). Other chapbooks include Semata, words from Ra Ra Junction, and Territory Retina. Poetry reviews have been featured in Open House, Open Space, and the Journal of Poetics Research. She is also a director, presently working on a production of Antigone, and most recently directed Anne’s White Glove, written by Alice Notley, and performed within the Alette in Oakland Symposium, 2014.

• Rain Taxi
  http://www.raintaxi.com/antisocial-patience/
  Word count: 1621

  QUOTED: "Antisocial Patience constitutes an homage to, and deconstruction of, Calvinist and Marxist doctrine. Brazil’s writing remains informed by a dialectical fin de un monde/debut de aussi monde sensibility, neither of which corresponds with a fin de siècle worldview (though they do overlap). As with much of contemporary poetry, Brazil’s lexicon can at times remain trapped within the private language of a coterie."
  "Given the stakes, the risks he takes are perhaps unavoidable, but one cannot say that the risks are 'worth' taking since such a rhetoric attaches a predetermined value to future labor, arresting possibility in advance. Contrarian at heart, Brazil imagines the risks of a patience even if, especially if, it is not worth it."

  David Brazil
  Roof Books ($15.95)

  by Tyrone Williams

  Over the last few years David Brazil has published two chapbooks of poems titled Holy Ghost. His last book, The Ordinary (Compline, 2013), concluded with a number of poems on, among other things, “the jew” vis-à-vis an upstart Christendom. Although Antisocial Patience is, in many respects, an extension of these previous works, it does not feature the multimedia collages and appropriated detritus of quotidian urbanity that marked much of The Ordinary. Instead, Antisocial Patience is, more narrowly, a series of meditations on the dilemma of works and grace, praxis and chance, for the “defeated” but righteous crusader-cum-activist.

  John Milton raised this problem in a different, albeit related, context after his vision was seemingly “defeated” by his eyes. At the turning point of the well-known sonnet “On His Blindness,” Milton, wondering how God expected him to do the Lord’s “work” after the loss of his eyesight, writes,

  But Patience, to prevent
  That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
  Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
  Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
  Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
  And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
  They also serve who only stand and wait.
  Allegorized, patience suspends disbelief, but if patience is also to be “personified” in one who is not part of the “thousands” who do God’s “bidding” by swarming “o’er land and ocean without rest,” how can one be “Patience” and Protestant at the same time? What are the proper stanzas—Donne’s “little rooms”—in and through which an ethos of protestation can engage the “social” by withdrawal from it? Is a stanza a nave or abbey only after its consecration by Luther’s theses? And is patience an analogue to or with (and the preposition matters) leftwing political “theory,” the condition(s) for the possibility of, social and political activism per Marx’s and Engels’ theses?

  These are the questions at the center and margins of Antisocial Patience. In between is the music of stanzas, meted out in rounds of metrical and free verse singing at once sincere, parodic, bewildered, confident, angry, tender, etc. Brazil’s peripatetic poems, stanzas, and lines suggest neither patience nor protest but, rather, crusades without crusaders. Here is a soundtrack without a movie, songs of exhortation both demotic and stately. To these ends, Brazil turns scripture into script (though “what we strive for in this song is just exactly/ imprescriptible”), a template for our present circumstances and values which, separated by the very histories they unfold as, can only appear as outrageous (mis)fortune reified and/or rectified by wresting a future meaning-to-be from the tyranny of the meant.

  Call it hope: the failures of social and political activism may be nurtured as the seedlings of “redemption” at some indeterminate time to come. Insofar as the “failed” Catholic but “successful” protester John Calvin is the “invisible hand” at work in these poems, the Jewish-Christian debate that closed The Ordinary is here supplemented, if not supplanted, by the Catholic-Protestant schism. This volatile divide functions as a “model” for state-enforcement of “the law” and citizen-activist resistance in the name of a “higher” law. Beginning with the given—a defeated, if heroic, left—Brazil ponders the remainder of “song,” of prosody, that both acknowledges and transcends defeat. Rejecting the commonplace narrative of the appropriation of the public by the private and the penetration of the private by the public—in brief, the problem of a “we” that does and does not speak for some (“compeers contra/ every cop who divvies up the/us into the getters and the gotten”) —Brazil rejects the temptation of a strict fundamentalist counternarrative (Marxist, religious, etc.). Instead, as a kind of negative capability or “patience,” he withdraws from the singularity of intent (stateless communism, heaven on earth) to “contemplate” plurality: any number of strategies and models for engagement must be reimagined (dead-ends entail forging new paths over or intersecting old ones) without—and with—institutionalization. This is, of course, as the epigraph makes clear, the position that Calvin took in the throes of his own personal crisis of faith. As Calvin knew, there is no refuge from the world or from The Church, a corporate body whose political, economic, and military power is the equivalent of a small nation: “a gunman in oikos & we” can always “prose us.” Brazil thus marks the constitution of Protestantism as a descant against (Anglican) London and (Catholic) Vatican cant—even as protest, suppressing its sectarian roots, towers into Protest, a twin of what was to be abandoned. The historical lessons to be derived from this relationship inform Antisocial Patience.

  As the book’s title suggests, Brazil posits the world outside individual consciousness as the realm of "anti-patience," a world where one acts and interacts with others. Thus the hermetic tendencies within Calvinism, an index of its relation to Catholic monasticism, are redeployed here as revolutionary "timing"—when to act and when to wait. Yet patience is, at best, a double-edged sword; it can be a high-level strategy as well as a ceding to the world. The revolutionary's metaphysics rejects the world as is for what might be (“fuck the escape that abjures/ renunciation of the merely given as/ my opening move”), and this orientation towards a future entails “voluntary” exile from institutional structures, private and public. If the oikos is thus exposed as the originary wound—"In/the text of the rite is a cut/in cloth of sacrifice”—what remains is just the wound, a mouth from which pours song. Song, like the singer, marks and is marked by scarification: “the pith of hymns will/travel to your ears and/dwell there, doing its/small work as fate majestic/over earth decrees.” Yet, song obeys its own laws (metrics, for example) and acts upon its singers and listeners—as persuasion sans rhetoric—without or beyond the reach of a law that comes to supplement the oikos, an "echo" of the original even if "flaws in wind told. building it had failed." For want of a law, a metric, or a pattern, possibility appears as participial, a bridge between the present and future, delicate as a houseless (if not homeless) law, "fortified by song.”

  Song is, of course, central to the Protestant rebellion: song and speech over and above the law, the house. But insofar as the activist seeks the secular equivalent of religious resistance, he or she remains haunted by what one had thought to have abandoned: “your law was my houses/your law settled time & now I’m/ cast to outer dark & crying/aloud for the echo, yes.” Calvin, torn between passive and active resistance, between works and grace, could not decide if it were more “holy” to enter the theater of war against the world (including a Catholicism reimagined as Babylon) or wait for God to avenge his martyrs (“Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, in Romans 12:19). Nonetheless, in the face of daily injustices, we as humans find it difficult to merely “serve and wait.” Waiting may lead to withdrawal from the world a la the monk and nun, exemplars of Catholic patience, while the activist nails thesis after thesis (Calvinist, Marxist, Islamist, etc.) to a door of the built, that which refuses to open to some (e.g., Levelers) and gapes way too wide for others (Babylon as the whore who refuses no one and nothing). This motif—refusing what ought to have been accepted, accepting what ought to have been refused—is never far from fin de siècle sensibilities. Brazil tries to sidestep this trap by accepting every encounter as “possibility” no matter how insignificant it might seem, and thus far this sensibility informs all his work. Rhetorically, Brazil deploys anagram (snow=nows), pun (“be my name write or be my name razed”), catachresis (“Rave, I’m homeroom, me”), and malapropos (“The past tense of seeing is seed”). Modalities dominate as Brazil gleefully uses, and abuses, inductive and deductive reasoning.

  Antisocial Patience constitutes an homage to, and deconstruction of, Calvinist and Marxist doctrine. Brazil’s writing remains informed by a dialectical fin de un monde/debut de aussi monde sensibility, neither of which corresponds with a fin de siècle worldview (though they do overlap). As with much of contemporary poetry, Brazil’s lexicon can at times remain trapped within the private language of a coterie. Given the stakes, the risks he takes are perhaps unavoidable, but one cannot say that the risks are “worth” taking since such a rhetoric attaches a predetermined value to future labor, arresting possibility in advance. Contrarian at heart, Brazil imagines the risks of a patience even if, especially if, it is not worth it.

  Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015