book review cassie mannes murray
known by salt tina mozelle braziel
winner, 2017 philip levine prize for poetry anhinga press, 2019
“to see out, I look through my shadow.” This is the home Tina Mozelle Braziel frames in known by salt, her 2017 Philip Levine Prize-winning collection. Covering the wide expanse of Alabama’s waterways and terrain, Braziel draws her reader from dirt to a trailer’s cool underbelly to the studs of a home built by her hands. In doing this, she capitalizes on the way home can be both a place one is fastened to and simultaneously rebuilding. Braziel layers several visions of what home is and can be. In the first section of the book-length quartet, titled Trespassing, Braziel writes of the blue collar of her first home. The section opens with a description of mending double and single wides, the natural beauty of grease, mechanics, manual labor. Braziel concentrates on this beauty: Dahlia bulbs, a girl who “dips paper boats in motor oil, / drops them in the lake to see them spin in ever-widening circles.” While the singlewide sits in view, so do the willow flies, the blossoms, her father’s salt capsules and grit, and home. In this section, Braziel shares sameness “with the hollow(s) dogs dug to bear puppies” when she crawls below the end of her trailer, but not before sharing her childhood home in a view of quaint, plain wonder.
102
raleigh review
