Alana Siegel Reviews David Brazil's Antisocial Patience

We're fortunate to see Alana Siegel's writing (or "contemplation," as she puts it) in Entropy, in a review of new work from fellow Bay Area poet David Brazil. The 18 poems in Antisocial Patience, published last April by Roof Books, "are a kind of diary of days lived in the aftermath of political upheaval, when it’s quiet" (Chris Nealon). Siegel adds that "[the] 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." More:

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...

Read all of "Love Law Wind: A review of antisocial patience by David Brazil" at Entropy.