When asked about his influences, Brett Eugene Ralph points to three enduring sources: growing up Southern working class in the 1970s and 80s, playing in punk rock bands, and practicing Tibetan Buddhism. Not a likely combination for a poet, but one that has brought forth Black Sabbatical, a debut collection that sings with gutbucket colloquialisms, hallucinatory interludes, and the storytelling tradition of Kentucky. Riled and immediate, Ralph's poems mark the sanctity of each given moment, however confusing or harrowing, to honor its singular beauty. A heightened lyricism, but one fraught with methamphetamine confessions, gurus disguised as donkeys and owls. The voice that booms from Black Sabbatical is of a seeker tearing the place apart, unafraid to see things for himself, to sing what he has seen, or to say what the long road that led here has cost him.

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Firm Against the Pattern

When I saw Charity dancing
alone in the farmhouse kitchen—
eyes closed, lips parted, held aloft
in one hand half a mango,
a gigantic butcher knife
clutched in the other—I froze
at the screen door as I always do
when I come upon someone praying.

All night I had been hitting
on the daughter of a tiny woman
orphaned by Hiroshima.
Grandparents had been lost, and the mother
would soon be dead though no one knew
if it was the blast or the facility
she retired next to in Utah.

This was the kind of bitter irony
that made you want to burn the flag—
even if it was against the law, even
on the Fourth of July on property owned
by a Republican state senator.
Which is precisely what would happen
later, after we’d drunk the wine.

Hey, he said in one of those voices
unique to fraternity members
high on nitrous oxide, anybody want a drink
of hundred-year-old Romanian wine?
Before we could answer, he had produced
from one of the pockets on his wheelchair
wine he meted out, so help me God,
from a Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle.

By the time that bottle made its way
around the bonfire, I was drunk
on kimonos wed to atom bombs
and motherless children left to cultivate
an excruciating beauty,
drunk on crippled tipplers
scarcely larger than dolls.

Like the wine my father fashioned
out of blackberries, out of plums,
it was sweet and very strong
and it wouldn’t have taken much to turn
Mrs. Butterworth upside down
until her skirts fell and I’d forgotten
that the cloud above Nagasaki rhymes
with the flag we raised on the moon.

As I watched Charity dance, I rested
my brow against the rusty screen
and that knife and mango might have been
a bottle and a beating heart,
a bomb and a burned up baby doll,
a flag and whatever comes to mind
when you read the word forgiveness.

Closing my eyes, I extended my tongue
and pressed it firm against the pattern:
I tasted yesterday’s rain, 
the carcasses of moths,
broken glances, tears,
the smoke of not-so-distant fires—
all those delicate gestures
we collect and call the seasons.

Blurbs

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Debut collection that sings with gutbucket colloquialisms, hallucinatory interludes, and the storytelling tradition of Kentucky

2007 Selection for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature

"When I was a teenager I used Brett Ralph's facility with language as an excuse for hope. As an adult, beyond idealism, I still find Brett's speech, verse, and prose sustaining, inspiring, even rescuing."

—Will Oldham

"Brett Eugene Ralph can surely write like the Dickens and I don't mean Charles. He's a true beast of a man with insight and beauty to spare."

—Harmony Korine

"Brett Eugene Ralph can look at a woman dancing alone, 'eyes closed, lips parted, held aloft / in one hand half a mango, / a gigantic butcher knife / clutched in the other,' and know immediately that she's praying. He drinks wine from a Mrs. Butterworth's bottle. And he knows that a donkey's bray sounds like 'somebody choking on a car horn.' But the giddy energy of the writing doesn't exist merely for its own sake. It's generated by the poems‚ struggling with endangered and extinct species, ill and abused children, nuclear war, and war unadorned with nuclear weaponry. Ralph's poems are serious, yes, but all the more powerful for their complex awareness of how to delight and to instruct are, at the highest level, the same thing."

—Andrew Hudgins

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