DM Bradford, Bottom Rail on Top

 

                                                Not a poem

but plantation dining room
    ceiling pulley fan
boy fatherlands and rope

I’m just now seeing a copy of Montreal-based poet and translator DM Bradford’s second full-length collection, Bottom Rail on Top (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a follow-up to Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Composed across an accumulated thirteen poem-sections, from “rope to” and “ashes to” to “new corps” and “lil chug,” the short poems of Bottom Rail on Top exist as sketch-notes, lyric bursts that suggest the gesture but are intricate and precise in their execution. As the back cover offers: “Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sees D.M. Bradford stage one personal present alongside American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation—a call and response between the complications of legacy and selfhood.” There is a kind of call-and-response to how these poems assemble, a through-line of notes and their commentary, akin to a kind of Greek chorus or counter-narrative. Each section, a cluster of short sketch-poems, with the occasional prose-commentary, providing a blend of further narrative, additional information and a kind of summing-up, set at the end of a handful of sections. The third section, “stock,” for example, ends with a prose block that begins: “Not a poem but a succession of little cuts. You hear about Sally Hemings over and over again. You don’t hear that much about Martha Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s first wife, being Sally’s half-sister. You don’t hear much about Betty Hemings, Martha’s father’s enslaved mistress, Sally’s mother. You don’t hear much about the other half-siblings, how many of them Martha, along with Thomas, inherited, the Hemings family among 135. Commonplace horrors.” Not a poem, Bradford repeats as a mantra across the title of each poem and the opening of each commentary, suggesting a push against the impossibility of the lyric while simultaneously offering its artifice, even as the poems work through and across it, connecting Bottom Rail on Top to works such as M NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2008) [see my archived review from The Antigonish Review here], for example. “Not a poem,” Bradford writes, near the end of the fifth section, “but to write at last / past the old place / one last time // by boat / the breeze and the sunshine / north by fatherlands / ten days and ten nights [.]”

As Bradford’s debut worked through an absent father, Bottom Rail on Top also runs as a book-length project wrapping around layers and application of lyric study around history, ancestry and echoes of slavery and the American south. To close the first section, Bradford’s untitled prose-block begins: “Not a poem, but a big house is a big house. Imagine I’m standing in one being told every brick that makes it up was made on site by children. That said children didn’t not look like me, and kept the fire going around the clock. Imagine the tour guide announcing all this, dressed to look like the mistress of the house. Someone helps dress her in the morning, pile the whole thing on, button it up the back.” The shadow of history is long indeed, even moreso if one doesn’t attempt to understand it, as Bradford writes to open the acknowledgments:

This work would not exist without the tether of ancestors enslaved in the so-called United States and Jamaica. In these outgrowths of the simple history I was raised with, that was meant to raise a Black man and an American, I look for them and find I can’t possibly know them. Looking at my life, I’m certain those ancestors, along with the many enslaved Africans this book is indebted to, would sooner recognize its mastery than its subjection. This work was in no small part shaped by that thought. And everything that connects me to them despite it.