Field Recordings

[...] it is fascinating to see a young poet staking his claim forcefully and beautifully in his first book.

~Keith Taylor

Brakefield beautifully inscribes how one internalizes the ephemeral nature of home.

~Kevin Carollo

Russell Brakefield is that rare, best kind of poet whose insights can change the world for his readers, who unveils the wild surprises and lurking dangers behind the seemingly familiar. Beneath his "buildings falling into pieces" there is the "rapture of foundations, / a storm of rust // and bodies raining up / against the sky." The world becomes clearer, stranger, and more uncanny as we read this poetry. Brakefield astonishes again and again in Field Recordings-a book full of individually riveting pieces, but one which, as a whole, casts a serious spell with its accumulating music and beauty and everyday sacredness, with its sacred, ordinary horror and wonder. Brakefield has written one of the strongest and most subtle collections of poetry I've read in a long time. This a collection to which one will return again and again, becoming ever more impacted by its power and more appreciative of the serious talent of this poet.

~Laura Kasischke, Author of Where Now: New & Selected Poems

Brakefield says a man can't be 'anything that doesn't / move for fear / of standing still' and all sound, all music, is motion, the cure for stillness. But these poems occupy both states equally: the ways we craft sound and story to crowd out silence and fear, and the stillness that precipitates but also defines whatever music we can manage. Here, the necessary paradox is sweet and stark, carefully tuned to its places of origin, and the people— here and gone— whose echoes haunt them.

~Raymond McDaniel

Like the great Alan Lomax, Russell Brakefield has traveled through rural Michigan making "field recordings." He listens to the music and to the instruments that make the music (the double bass "gathers up grace" – which seems the perfect description of those notes!). And he talks to the people who make the music and the listen to it. These poems don't forget the shores and the birch trees, the sea birds or "the clumsy pub." He tells us that in "this Peninsula I'm no more minstrel than ghost,/minor chord blue note." I don't think Russell Brakefield's chords, his poems, are minor at all; they are strong and clear and make the necessary music.

~Keith Taylor

Russell Brakefield is that rare, best kind of poet whose insights can change the world for his readers, who unveils the wild surprises and lurking dangers behind the seemingly familiar. Beneath his buildings falling into pieces there is the rapture of foundations, / a storm of rust // and bodies raining up / against the sky. The world becomes clearer, stranger, and more uncanny as we read this poetry. Brakefield astonishes again and again in Field Recordings—a book full of individually riveting pieces, but one which, as a whole, casts a serious spell with its accumulating music and beauty and everyday sacredness, with its sacred, ordinary horror and wonder. Brakefield has written one of the strongest and most subtle collections of poetry I've read in a long time. This a collection to which one will return again and again, becoming ever more impacted by its power and more appreciative of the serious talent of this poet.

~Laura Kasischke

With folk music as his guide, Brakefield traverses the Great Lakes region in these poems, from its primordial beginning to its modern days. In the beginning all art was audible, he writes in a collection that ambles through the natural world while keeping a finger firmly on the pulse of how the world shapes people into what they are. At its center is one poem: a long-form, multi-stanza piece inspired by oral historian Alan Lomax, who, in 1938, traveled around the Great Lakes basin, collecting recordings. This titular poem has elements of Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry in its dreamy scope and its traversing of time and space. But the rest of the collection roams widely as well, touching on ideas of family and masculinity (This is America and we are boys / slowly tiring into our fathers) and on how people so often cannot be still (Movements of people / or animals across land is called migration / and also displacement). Deeply rooted in its oral histories, Brakefield's collection sings.

~Maggie Reagan