As Love Prodigal grieves a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family trauma, and chronic illness appear. There is an urge to detach, to go numb. Yet, pain is always returned as a gift—the beautiful vulnerability of feeling. Throughout the collection, in conversations with Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bachelard, images of the phoenix appear; its metaphor seems to promise an easy and endless cycle of rebirth—a forever life, forever alone. But Brimhall says, Screw that! She’d rather reach for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. When the body becomes a site the poet “cannot live in or leave,” she finds strength in the beauty of the natural world, in motherhood, in desire, in new love, in “a thousand small pleasures that made [her] want to live.”

Told through various forms—aubades, a crown of prose sonnets, an admissions essay—Love Prodigal says yes to second (and third and fourth) chances. The heart gets bigger every time it heals.

I’ve resisted love the way violets resist a perfumer,

refused to give in as easily as roses, run at the first scent

of trouble, peeling off my pillowcase before heading

for the door. But my nose is amorous and guilty.

In some languages, the etymology of kiss is to smell,

to get close enough to nuzzle the soft or scratch

of a lover’s neck. The hands of the man who taught me

how to check the suspected recluse’s back for a violin

smelled like basketballs, but I kissed them. The rest of him

was Dial soap and wet leaves. In the nineteenth century,

women put apples under their armpits before gifting them

to admirers. The lucky recipients could smell that ripe

bodily dew and then taste it, all apocrine and crisp delicious

at the end of a waltz. Aroma, sweet prelude to appetite,

as important as wind to the sex lives of trees.

Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing and narrative medicine at Kansas State University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Love Prodigal (published November 2024 by Copper Canyon). Her poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, the National Parks Service, the Academy of American Poets, and Purdue Library’s Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She’s the current poet laureate for the State of Kansas.