concussion fragment by Brendan Walsh
Elsewhere Press, 2020
A pocket sized chapbook with a dark, blurry cover design, concussion fragment’s (elsewhere press 2022) look belies its heft in a way that is apt considering its speaker’s many normalized repressions. Brendan Walsh depicts maturation as a balance of potentiality and vulnerability, a war with instincts in effort to both grow and feel safe. His deft, musical poems feel dreamlike despite their rootedness in tangible relationships. Bodies can transform to the size of landmasses, even if they are literally withering.
While predominantly prose, the titular poems often end in breaks that stirred me. After each is a clean, reorienting flashback poem, mimicking the cycling of head injury and recovery. These subtle formal choices are tonally aligned with the collage illustrations by Evan Nicholls. The pieces utilizing greyscale and full color source material as well as text are particularly of the surreal world Walsh builds. A highlight was concussion fragment two-point five, a poem about a brother versus brother wrestling match in which a head injury is likened to ‘a plane-crash dream’. It is accompanied by collage of a boy, crown of head reddened, against a mountainous pattern with the phrase ‘BONES ARE A DANGER’ above, an eerie atmosphere for one of the less fantastical of the titular poems.
This collection explores impetuses for and consequences of sports more than actual competition with increasing transparency throughout its first half. While early poems tend to focus on wrestling or the speaker’s offseason sport, lacrosse, there is only one poem describing wrestling in the second half. This last depiction is notable not only for the reemergence of wrestling, but also because it is the first time wrestling is noncompetitive and not actively deteriorating the speaker’s body. The poem maintains the collection’s ominous vibes, but is a moment where we see the speaker messing around with their friends. These moments are a rare oasis for the speaker throughout, standing in contrast to the dominant themes.
While concussion fragment depicts a good deal of pain, the second half allows the potential, the inherent holiness of the human body to shine through. This recontextualization, along with Walsh’s sharp, surprising descriptions, drew me to immediately reread the collection when I finished. It’s a striking exploration of how abundant and adaptive humans are in the face of cruelty and scarcity both despite and because of, as Walsh puts it, ‘the body’s desire for ground’.
ALEX WELLS SHAPIRO is a poet and artist from the Hudson Valley, living in Chicago. He reads submissions for Frontier Poetry, serves as business and grants manager for Another Chicago Magazine, and co-curates Exhibit B: A Reading Series presented by The Guild Literary Complex. His debut poetry collection is forthcoming in Spring 2022 with Unbound Edition Press. More of his work may be found at www.alexwellsshapiro.com.