controlled burn

Rooms for Rent in the Burning City

By Brandon Courtney

Spark Wheel Press ($11.95)

Brandon Courtney’s second book of poetry, Rooms for Rent in the Burning City, blazes like a fire burning in an ancient Mesopotamian reed thicket; the image of burning animates these poems with a kind of Heraclitian urgency that illuminates the difficulties and darkness inherent in a soldier’s journey home. Here, the image of a father rummaging through his workbench for matches to light a lantern coexists with images of Bagdad burning and the sight of flames razing a neighboring farmhouse where a girl was gang raped decades ago. The neck of a wounded soldier in a veteran’s hospital becomes a wick as he, and the phantom limb of a father, contemplate leaving a burning city; this wounded soldier is compared to Achilles, whose wrath was a fire consuming itself. Courtney, who served four years in the United States Navy during Operation Enduring Freedom, offers a compelling look at PTSD; he implicitly constructs a corollary between violence abroad and the culture of violence that immerses popular discourses of masculinity in America.

Courtney divides the collection into three sections: “Antechamber,” “The Roman Room,” and “The Crying Room.” The first section focuses primarily on experiences of homecoming through the lens of PTSD. The second section consists of a single long poem, which explores the process of remembering. The second stanza reads:

Place your memories—one by one on each small surface,

each ledge & sill, until the room you’ve spent your whole life

haunting

is filled with the simple architecture of images.

For Courtney, the art of memory, and of poetry, consists in placing and arranging this simple architecture; however, the poet is keenly aware of how illusory such arrangements are—if memory is a palace, then it is also a place to be guarded from without and from within. The third section of Rooms for Rent in the Burning City centers on figures of family: mother, grandmother, sister, and father. In this section, figures of night, sleep, and blindness predominate. Nonetheless, as the poem “Waking” notes: “the other side of light, shadow,/mouths the word for home.”

Brandon Courtney is a poet of departures and returns, as are all true soldiers. His work is reminiscent, in its precise unravelling strangeness, of Bruce Weigl’s poetry; the poems in this collection recall James Dickey’s, in their hardscrabble radiance (the James Dickey of “The Sheep Child” and “May Day Sermon”). The poem, “On Seeing My Ex-Wife at the Farmer’s Market” ends with an image that sums up the entire collection:

Everything you taught

me about leaving

tells me to distrust

the sudden stillness

of the soft-edged

pomegranate

& its hundred hearts within.

The violent dislocation of combat and the failure of a marriage recombine in the unbroken pomegranate; what is whole must be broken open if it might nourish, and Courtney is all about this work of breaking open. Unlike the pomegranate, Courtney’s poetry is hard-edged, muscular, thorny, and yet it too conceals a hundred hearts within.

Dante Di Stefano's poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Southern California Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea Gonzalez Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He works as a high school English teacher in Endicott, New York.

For more work by Dante Di Stefano check out the Online Sundries site here.

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