Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

Written during the trial for a close friend's murder, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod exposes that the whimsical, horrible, and absurd all sit together. In this ambitious fourth collection, Traci Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and death within herself as she lives through a series of impossibilities: the sentencing of her friend's murderers, the birth of her child, the death of her mother, divorce, a trip sailing through the Arctic. In lullaby, lyric essay, and always with brutal sincerity, Brimhall examines how beauty and terror live right alongside each other--much like how Nod is both a fictional dreamscape and the place where Cain is exiled for murdering Abel. By plucking at the tensions between life and death, love and hate, truth and obscurity, Brimhall finds what it is that ties opposing themes together; how love and loss are married in grief. Like Eve thrust from Eden, Brimhall is tasked with finding meaning in a world defined by its cruelty. Unrelenting, incisive, and tender, these poems expose beauty in the grotesque and argue that the effort to be good always outweighs the desire to succumb to what is easy.

Traci Brimhall has written four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod, Saudade, Our Lady of the Ruins, which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, and PBS Newshour. She has received fellowships from the Breadloaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Arctic Circle Residency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds degrees from Florida State University (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA), and Western Michigan University (PhD), and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.