#2: Reviewing Bronwyn Bradley

So today I announced my housemates and I are hosting a backyard poetry gig, ideally monthly, starting with our inaugural event on 26 August from 8pm.

It’s a curated event with four featured poets, three of which I will reveal in the coming days.

One of which you, dear newsletter reader, get to find out early.

Bronwyn Joanna Fyre Bradley does many things. For work, she teaches children how to swim and tutors students of all ages in basic English to university law. She also paints, crafts, writes fan-fiction and studies for the medical entrance exam.

When she performs poetry, she performs it with an electric energy. Bronwyn has an eye for a story and an ear for a rhythm and combines the two to craft ballads that sting. 

Her rare love poem How to Re-Magnetise a Compass Needle captures the skin-crawling, sweaty withdrawal a long-distance lover experiences when they end a phone call – and the high of the answer. 

Her slam piece Mother Raised a Prostitute stares hard into the face of the underlying assumptions which lead to victim-blaming after sexual assault. 

Her portrait piece The Art of Self-Immolation problematizes the often-rose-coloured glasses with which we view toxic romantic tropes, including the manic pixie dream girl and the messy b****. 

We could make a year feel like a one night stand.

No one taught you how to love,

And you never asked.

And I never offered.

Instead, I remember you like 

a vigil

a mirror

a warning

Her World War II ballad William A. spawned a near-obsession with documenting the military mission which killed her great-uncle and the horrors of war more widely. She is currently working on a series of poems for this project.

Each of Bronwyn’s poems use a self-imposed rhythm and rhyme scheme which invokes a musical element into her performance. The pieces’ lyricism, percussive punctuation and theatrics prompt me always to beg for a spoken-word performance. I crave ambient sound, stage lighting, the pieces strung together like a story. It’s not often that I want these things in a poetry performance. I view spoken-word a lot like the semicolon: used much too often without insight into what it does. But Bronwyn’s poetry inspires a unique drive in me to seek it.

Bronwyn has performed at SpeakEasy Poetry and the Ruckus Poetry Slam competition series, being named a finalist at the latter. You can catch her at our late-night poetry tea party by going to the Facebook event.

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