Locomotive Cathedral - Paperback

With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as "baptism on repeat." Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life's fluid, ungraspable nature. Poem by poem, essay by essay, she builds a temple to the perpetual motion of transformation, the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on Earth: "not dying, but molting."

Brandel France de Bravo is the author of the poetry collections Provenance and Mother, Loose and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2024, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Diode, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.