Longlisted 2024 Raymond Souster AwardA rolling call and response between antebellum Black history and the present that mediates it. Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sets off a mediation between the complications of legacy and selfhood. In a kind of archives-powered unmooring of the linear progress story, award-winning poet D.M. Bradford fragments and recomposes American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation, and stages the action in tandem with the matter of his own life. Amidst echoes and complicities, roots and flights, lineage and mastery, it's a story of stories told in knots and asides, held together with paper trails, curiosities, and hooks - a study that doesn't end.

Winner 2022 A.M. Klein Prize for PoetryShortlisted 2022 Griffin Poetry PrizeShortlisted 2022 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award2022 Governor General's Literary Awards Finalist2022 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal Jury SelectionShortlisted 2022 Concordia University First Book Prize An expansive, hybrid, debut collection of prose poems, self-erasures, verse, and family photo cut-ups about growing up in a racially trinary, diversely troubled family. Dream of No One but Myself is an interdisciplinary, lyrical unravelling of the trauma-memoir-as-proof-it's-now-handled motif, illuminating what an auto-archival alternative to it might look like in motion. Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, David Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can't quite reconcile. The translation of early memory into language is a set of decisions, and in Dream of No One but Myself, Bradford decides and then decides again, composing a deliberately unstable, frayed account of family inheritance, intergenerational traumas, and domestic tenderness. More essayistic lyric than lyrical essay, this is a satisfyingly unsettling and off-kilter debut that charts, shapes, fragments, and embraces the unresolvable. These gorgeous, halting poems ultimately take the urge to make linear sense of one's own history and diffract it into innumerable beams of light.