“Like a successful surgical procedure, Blake’s work may hurt at first, but it can also be a first step towards healing, a new state of emotional wellness.”
When All Is Lost by Brandon Blake
Self-published $5.00
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Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan
Some poets find their voice in, and respond to, historic and cataclysmic times or events. Other poets find their voice in, and respond to, the precise, poetic details to be found in everyday life. Brandon Blake’s newest, self-published chapbook, When All Is Lost, offers the reader nuanced and insightful poems that speak to the specific details of the narrator’s post-breakup existence as well as gross injustices occurring in Philadelphia. It is a slim collection (13 pages), but this work contains multitudes and has lingered in my mind longer than its length may immediately suggest.
In his poem, “The Day After,” Blake’s narrator describes a first thought in the first morning after a breakup:
Switching the alarm off
Before it detonates &
Interrupts melancholy states.
He continues to expand upon the emptiness of daily rituals without his partner, without someone to snuggle or shower with—
The shower’s heat doesn’t hold so well
This morning.
His commute has even changed and “lost its vibrancy.” This poem provides the reader with commandingly specific details that the narrator’s heartache becomes palpable, corporeal. The reader, then, is led to recall the details, the rawness of their own dissolved relationships. It is a testament to Blake’s wordsmith skills that he grants himself poetic space to express an intensity of feeling and grants readers the space to work towards their own catharses. Like a successful surgical procedure, Blake’s work may hurt at first, but it can also be a first step towards healing, a new state of emotional wellness.
Blake’s narrator uses his hobbies, as we all do, to distract from his pain, explored in the complex and devastating poem, “My Addiction with Origami.”
I found my fix
deep within the folds as
paper cuts and calloused fingers
provided needed distraction
He finds a place “to tuck away pride and ego” in his folding. He cannot totally escape from his current emotional state as his origami attempts begin to resemble his relationship. This poem resounds with the truth that art can be a way to mitigate our pain, but it is also the place where we confront it. I have rarely found a poem that expresses this fact with as much clarity and beauty as I have found in this poem, my favorite in this collection.
Blake ends this powerful chapbook with poems that move beyond the personal and enter the Philadelphia political arena. With the poem, “Hey Yo, Adriane,” he invokes the cinematic Rocky legend to relay the experience of a woman with a
Scrawny handwritten sign announcing
“Too ugly to prostitute.”
Whether through astute observation, intuitive imagination, or both, Blake gives a voice to this “Adriane to anyone’s Rocky,” a woman that many city-dwellers would choose to ignore. If only this poem was as well-known as the Rocky statue, we could see real change in Philadelphian society.
As a native Philadelphian, Blake also calls for us to remember the MOVE bombing of 1985 in the powerful closing poem, “Attention MOVE…This is America.” Blake paints a clear picture of that morning of devastation with the lines:
Eastern light
accentuating adrenaline-fueled veins
dissipating
in sweat behind blue collars
barely restraining the hounds of justice.
The tension and the sorrow build as all local readers know how this poem must end, although in a better and more humane world the MOVE bombing would not have taken place. But in 1985 and in America, it unfortunately did. Blake closes this vital chapbook with the image of,
dreadlocked cherubs
breaking free from the licks of fiery shackles
escaping Puritan purgatory
vanishing in the Philly skyline.
No poet, or pugilist for that matter, packs a punch like Brandon Blake.
Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). He is currently at work on several literary projects as well as teaching a chapbook class this spring. He currently serves on the Moonstone Press Editorial Board, as head poetry editor for Toho, and workshop instructor for Green Street Poetry.