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BOOK REVIEW | Bury Me in Cherry Blossoms

reviewed by Elizabeth Higgins


Eric Braman’s debut collection Bury Me in Cherry Blossoms guides the reader through a botanical garden of memory. The speaker breathes through moss and allspice, hungers for honey and violets, and inhales lavender against a backdrop of soft-focus scenes that bloom with ever-present flora. Braman’s structure is botanical, with section headings (beginning with “Elm” and ending with “Cherry”) that represent tonal shifts and create narrative structure. In romantic fashion, the book begins with pain, and guides the reader through a partial parting of clouds,  characterized and framed throughout by an indulgence in the beauty of nature at its most fruitful, most promising, and most temperate. 

The narrative arc of the first three poems of Bury Me in Cherry Blossoms presents a queer coming-of-age under hetero- and cisnormativity. The book opens with a speaker trying to brush away the aftertaste of a (perhaps abusive) intimate partner until the act becomes self-injurious (“bloodstains swirling / down the drain” (5)), a speaker who says:


I could never stand 

your stale flavor

but I chipped my

teeth chewing the

tough leather it

takes to

be a man (4)


With the generational marker of “sharpie-etched surfaces” (9) of mix CDs, the third poem, “Learning to Drive,” addresses a physical recklessness where “My / car collected my mistakes” (9), culminating in a poignant revelation that suggests the personal cost of social exclusion. Thus begins a thread that runs intermittently through these poems: an irrevocable loss of an ethereal aspect of the self.

This loss is evident, if understated. More words are spent on what has been gained, and the terrain encountered on the way. Some of the most compelling passages are those in-between moments when the speaker’s experience shifts:


The vodka evaporated from

the sweat on our temples

as snow fell outside;

we warmed the room

with the friction of our fumbles.

Your freckles glowed

like lightning bugs 

dancing in the forests of Kentucky.

I never told you

how much they helped me see

the pieces of myself

I hid from view

in the sobriety of daytime. (29)


This transformative arc continues, and is presented in short and long form throughout the collection.  Ending the second section, “Fern,” is a piece that demonstrates this arc in the short form, offering a retrospective on love by way of taste memories of whiskey, from fifth grade where “We winced and grimaced, / smiled broad and weird / and said, it’s good” (35), to the present:


when he picked up the

crystal wedding decanter

and poured me a glass

of that expensive stuff (38)


The third section, “Chamomile,” marks a fuller embodiment of the openness and comfort developed in “Fern.” It opens, in part, with the words “I’ve found the sips soften my edges / until I’m an ocean-tossed stone all / salt all lemon all sunset all summer” (41). This passage mirrors evocations of natural abundance in the book as a whole, which are woven inside poems as well as section headings, together building a net and lifting the pieces that explore pain more directly. These passages lend an affirmative, revitalizing quality to the larger work. 

For this reader, among the collection’s highlights are the parentheticals of a seven-poem series on morning routines, and a piece about a YouTube video on rug cleaning “that scratch[es] the surface of all / the cleaning that needs to be done” (69). The “Morning Routine” series represents the connection and stability so absent from the collection’s opening by offering a series of images of a couple waking and, on various days, getting up, snoozing the alarm, and laying in bed “like two tangled noodles / floating in a pot” (51). Repeated usage of indented parentheticals lends a dimensional expansion and under-the-breath quality to this series, with line pairs such as “reading clickbait / (in my underwear)” (50), and “You wake before me / (I notice)” (55). The latter piece, “Rug Cleaner (A YouTube Retrospect),” evokes the enormity of the physical and metaphorical tasks of cleansing: 


            I just need to soak a bit,

let loose the soil and give up


the toxic bits I’ve locked in 

my stitch. (69)


From the bronze Apollo gracing the cover, to the cursive section headings and steadfast promise of hope, this collection is a sustained nod to the romantic, with a generous voice and distinctive interest in imprinting experience with botanical gestures. Even when speaking of rancid tomatoes that “burst like water / balloons in the palm of my / hand” (80), Braman’s work maintains an attention to the natural world that orients the reader toward awe and a certain amount of renewal, in time. Acknowledging—mourning—the impossibility of total renewal (“I never found the freedom / to sprout full bloom / like fuschia or geranium” (88)), Braman reminds the reader that somewhere petals are unfurling in a whole spectrum of vivid colors, as they have before and will again.






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