Brother Sleep

The poems in Brother Sleep, Aldo Amparán’s debut collection, slink and stagger across the page as they explore homoeroticism and the speaker’s painful estrangement from a deceased brother. A profound grief undercuts these intertwining themes, and in “Ghosting,” Amparán applies the slang term for abrupt romantic abandonment to the speaker’s relationship with their brother, describing the aftermath of his passing, as if “a gray vulture // clawed into the calico couch / where you slept”:

             Without you, I often

have dreams of dying
              in the desert, choking

on cacti. Of spines & serpents
              & the vast & yellow sky

that is your absence. […]

Elsewhere, the speaker attempts to reconcile with their brother and to restore an extinguished bloodline:

Before you

& I
were born
our hearts
were ripe

fruit dangling
in a lonely
woman’s
backyard.

But, in “Genealogy,” the speaker recalls “a man came home to dig out the dead / maple tree in the backyard,” as if presaging the tragic end of their family tree. 

Amparán draws on many unique formal techniques, including an imploded villanelle that accelerates the traditional refrains through the use of vertical line breaks (“My smallest brother has outgrown | me: he tumbles into sand, mortar, | & salt: has expanded & contracted: he burns | in the lonely furnace”) and a series of poems entitled “Glossary for What You Left Unsaid,” which mimic the form of a dictionary, with suggestive definitions of words in English and Spanish, as in these lines from the entry for “gaslight”:

[…]                                   the savage               darling:

tall dark stranger                that came                into your life:

that forged the fissure         on your face—       […]

But Amparán also manages moments of gentler sensuality by combining exquisite imagery, expertly crafted consonance, and subtle syllabics:

His hipbone’s
an orchid
embellishing
the unlit suite.