During My Nervous Breakdown I Want To Have A Biographer Present
by Brandon Scott Gorrell / Review by J. A. Tyler
from the back cover:
anxiety...low self-confidence...alienation
Brandon Scott Gorrell’s debut poetry collection DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN I WANT TO HAVE A BIOGRAPHER PRESENT, published by Muumuu House in July 2009, is about more than what it claims.
Characters in this gathering of poetry are rare, unless one reads these poems as part of a fictional character’s collective consciousness rather than Gorrell’s own personal anxieties and attempted ego-deflating laid out on pages. And regardless of any character that these poems are attached to, the focus here is pure self, the unadulterated and ever-present ‘i’.
from ‘great’:
i want my body’s audience to feel intense fear i want my body’s audience to feel extremely small i want my body’s audience to feel an extreme moment of beauty i want the collision to be silent, in blackness
Denying Gorrell his poetic beatitudes and straight-faced imagery is difficult and not worth the effort, but this book is in actuality about the opposite of what it contends. DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN is not apathy in robotic tones, is not about the character bound to a bed, rife with emotional guilt, sickened in his own disaster. This collection is a mapping of longing and desire, about penning passion under the guise of a neutral mask, about pretending to strip away the drive while actually high-lighting it.
from ‘a 53 million year-old fossilized spider that was recently discovered frozen in amber and taken x-rays of and had its insides displayed on a massive internet database with other creatures that were fossilized and had x-rays taken of them and had their insides displayed on a massive internet database’:
the time i’ve spent in amber can fold into a golden origami crane and fly into an infinite void and unfold into a soft, purple aura that absorbs the solar system
i have no idea what that means and i will spend the rest of my life writing beautiful images that mean nothing more than i am trying to trick people into liking my writing
Be it author or character, the heart of this collection is in its longing, its desire to be anything but itself, its constant and back-arching wants. The poems here are thick with this desire, written heavily in the face of all this writer wants to be, wants to do, wants to become.
Apathy is uncaring, a fruitless un-attempt. DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN is not about apathy. Gorrell’s poems are hurting, and in each of their claims to destroy and separate they are in looking for touch and closeness, intense encounters to make meaning. These poems recount the mundane not as a display of all that is undone, but as a clear picture of everything that is sought after.
from ‘massive earth’:
the earth is a planetary body the space shuttle goes into space and looks at the earth what is the space shuttle doing a piece of the earth between a larger part of itself and the moon i am a piece of the earth between a larger part of itself and the moon what am i doing
Gorrell’s is writing poetry that is seeking, that is in search of. DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN I WANT TO HAVE A BIOGRAPHER PRESENT not to witness my going, but to connect with another human being, instead of in my own head so much of the time.
J.A. Tyler reviews books and things for Rumble Magazine. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. He is a male human.