Heavy Bloom, by Angelina Oberdan Brooks

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. The poems in Heavy Bloom move from watching an 18-wheeler strike a blue heron to being stalked by a mountain lion in West Texas to considering the carelessness with which we harm each other. The originating images in these poems are memories or fragments of language that Angelina Oberdan Brooks collected as she found a way to bloom while processing loss on all fronts. Her hands largely stopped working, which led to a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis and a disintegration of the life she’d planned. Her father’s cancer became terminal, and he slowly died at home—over months and then days. To all of this, the relationship she was in didn’t hold up. Unable to cope, Brooks moved herself and her three dogs into an SUV and solo-camped from the Blue Ridge in NC to the Uintas in UT. Brooks collected fragments of images and language as she roadtripped across the country. She dives deep into Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry and follows each initial