Architect

When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life, writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss. Meanwhile, the midwestern landscape beyond these roomsthe same landscape that infuses the low, horizontal forms of Wrights Prairie Style buildingsshapes the figures in Architect as well as their fates: For years after my brothers death, I collected news articles on people who died young and tragically in landlocked states. Prairie Style deathsboys sucked down into grain silos or swept up by tornadoes or fallen through a frozen pond. The boys I didnt know, but the landscape I did. The dread of it. How many miles you can look ahead. For how long you see what is coming.