Requiem for Used Ignition Cap by J. Scott Brownlee
Orison Books, 2015
At the opening of Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize, stands an epigraph from the Hebrew prophet Hosea: Therefore shall the land mourn, and everyone that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the river also shall be taken. Ominous a beginning as it is, this portion of sacred text is fitting for J. Scott Brownlee’s debut full-length collection, a book of poems that kick up dust, wildflowers, dead bodies and haunted memories from the West Texas landscape that raised him.
Brownlee, a founder of The Localists—a collective that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory and the aesthetically marginalized working class—hails from Llano, Texas, where many of these poems unfold. In “Plunge,” a piece near the beginning of the book, the speaker catalogues the town’s tragedies with a repetition that creates a sense of watching precious contents swirl dismally toward a drain:
Empty the summer of its sweat… // Empty the casket of the other boy / who drowned and his mother’s Bible where she wrote her son’s name / in the margins a thousand times. / Empty the parable where Jesus walks / on water in a storm and revise it. / Write: Jesus drowns. Everyone does. // Empty the disappearing town / I’m both a part of and depart from …
But if the reader of this collection feels any empathy, it’s because Brownlee yanks the sink’s plug in order to siphon away the cloudy water of avoidance and highlight what lies in the basin: the land, Jesus, addicts, athletes, beauty, disillusionment, love, and heat.
This connection to a seemingly evaporating homeland is further explored in “Disappearing Town,” where the poet continues to speak of the place that both contains and can no longer contain him. Except here, the speaker stands in as an ambassador for the voiceless, those who are overlooked or have lost a sense of where they fit in the larger narrative of the nation:
Here, / there’s only the road / with its white crosses / showing where cars skidded off… // “Why don’t you visit?” / We can start on the north side of town / where the poorest folks live in tin shacks / or disheveled trailers without cited voices. // Don’t you forget they have stories to tell.
Truthfully, one can only feel such a depth of heartache over a place when s/he also possesses a deep love. Brownlee teaches us about home. And it is clear for the author that, even amidst the deluge of disappearance, Llano holds immense value, and every resident—suicidal veterans, deer along the highway, catfish heads on a clothesline, and flowers that blossom in roadside ditches—is a teacher. Dusty as this Texan town may be, the soil is still rich with lessons.
Brandon Jordan Brown is a Southern poet living in Los Angeles. A former PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow, he was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and his work has been published in Forklift, Ohio; Winter Tangerine Review; Day One; and more. Find Brandon online at brandonjordanbrown.com.