Bramble Winter/Spring 2021 print issue is also available.
Reckonings
Editor’s Note
How fitting that poetry was in the spotlight at the Biden-Harris inauguration on January 20th.
Given the violent, criminal acts of just two weeks earlier—an armed and predominantly white male mob storming the Capitol on behalf of a defeated racist’s lust for power—the day might well have turned out otherwise.
All the more fitting, then, that a Black American woman, Amanda Gorman, delivered the inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb,” her upfront reckoning with the enduring challenge of the American experiment.
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors,
characters and conditions of man…
During Gorman’s moving and spirited reading, I thought she came through brilliantly with what Hemingway called grace under pressure. And not only that—she seemed to be relishing the moment. Way to go, poet!
And yet. And yet. It will take more than poetry and poetic justice to get America out of the deep holes it’s dug for itself, and this would be much easier to do if the bottommost depths dated back only four years instead of four hundred.
Whatever comes next, good poems, new or old—whatever their form, style, origin, voice or language—will be essential parts of personal and/or political reckonings with where and how we live.
Thirty such poems appear in this issue of Bramble, quite a few more than usual. Given the moment and the submissions received, including more poems seemed an appropriate way to serve writers and Bramble’s readers.
Mark Zimmermann
March 2021
Mark Zimmermann is currently working on a book-length poetry manuscript focused on his life in Japan, where he lived from 1990-91 and 1993-2001. His first poetry collection, Impersonations, was published in 2015 by Pebblebrook Press, and work from it has been featured on Milwaukee Public Radio’s “Lake Effect,” at The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and in Wisconsin People and Ideas, and was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poems and prose have appeared in a variety of print and online venues. Currently he lives in Milwaukee with his wife Carole and two cats.
Resuscitate 1 by Mollie Oblinger
Artist Statement:
Fragments and splinters, cuts partially through images, and unfinished kernels of work litter the studio in bags, boxes, and piles. Once spliced apart, scraps of photos from one location mingle with those from another creating a relationship I hadn’t noticed before. Torn between preserving, transforming every piece of the landscape in the work & a desire to start fresh, to move on from the unresolved.
In my recent work, the images weave back and through themselves. The environment twists, conceals, and opens itself. In exploring the activity occurring just below the surface of the visible, I am interested in exposing the ways in which we undermine our natural environment.
Oblinger’s recent exhibitions include solo shows at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee, Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts in Fond du Lac, and Miami University in Ohio. She been awarded residencies at Playa in Oregon, the Alpena Wildlife Sanctuary in Michigan, and in New Mexico at the Roswell Artist in Residence.
She has public artworks along the Kinnickinnic River Trail in Milwaukee and schools in New Mexico. Oblinger received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Davis and a BFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Ripon College in Wisconsin. www.mollieoblinger.com
This is how we fought. Forearm meeting
wrist with clench and heat. If not fingers