Darby Minott Bradford is a poet, editor, translator, and sometimes curator. A lifelong Montrealer, Bradford’s work formally engages and frustrates dominant conceptions of Blackness in the Diaspora. They are the author of Dream of No One but Myself (2021), which won the A.M. Klein QWF Prize for Poetry, was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, Governor General Literary Award and Gerard Lampert Memorial Award, and was longlisted for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Bradford’s first translation, House Within a House (2023) by Nicholas Dawson, received the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award and John Glassco Translation Prize, and was shortlisted for the Governor General Literary Awards for French-to-English translation. Their most recent book of poetry, Bottom Rail on Top (2023), works to complicate prevailing conceptions of Blackness by staging one personal present alongside American histories of antebellum Black life. Bradford holds a BA from Concordia University and an MFA from the University of Guelph. They live and work in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal) on the unceded territory of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka nation.
Judges’ Citation
Dream of No One but Myself immerses the reader into an archival torrent of intergeneration trauma.
Dream of No One but Myself immerses the reader into an archival torrent of intergeneration trauma. This stunning debut never settles for formal complacency as it navigates the rhythmical intelligence of linguistic play, the anguished vigilance of footnotes, and the creased visual proofs of tenderness. Amid his troubled subjects, David Bradford’s most urgent relationship is with language. The poet’s inventive language never slips into just a stunt: it surprises and stirs with its honesty and vulnerability and manages to make whole everything it has so spectacularly torn.
Selected poems
by D.M. Bradford
now might have done
my wee own count
fed no
How my palm fi ts
n a
What a thought
second voice clicking In
Just
What rise
kept keeping
said What would
me a n
well the little
remains
I’m still walking in
Copyright © 2021 David Bradford, Dream of No One but Myself, Brick Books
Little Thing
Won’t let your bad self.
Let go of your old debt.
Tiring of your old self.
Won’t let your made bed.
Let your bad blood let.
Your grown debt get.
That grown self to sleep.
The what the fuck I meant.
In that slump long wind
clapping. Spitting storm
mean out my slow will. Head
a drum out the old lived.
Home won’t my slow chill.
Say goodbye to me.
Or ghost off in the burning.
Cause the minute I burned it.
We were together again.
Palm pleated in the pomade.
All blue magic guarantee
of our broke-ass small pack wave.
Already too dark to see and.
That indigo shimmer shade and.
Already our old bloodied teeth
Our old flesh in a braid.
Singing my angry maybe
dad’s bad pentameter way.
How I get so carsick I grieve.
Brown-bag the lowing heat.
The whole palpable Philly rides
all the way to the service.
His old value human gift.
Dust in a pine can. Six
years in the Delaware
I ain’t ever getting back. No
plot. Ever safe from anyone.
Too late to help. Or stop
letting what I lost.
Be what I lost.
Copyright © 2021 David Bradford, Dream of No One but Myself, Brick Books
The Plot
and I liked it
everything now is
language : fat deli
pickle jars : cot myrtle
and bog : hot
moonbeam in the mouth
compost speckling off
a last sputtering minute : down
out a ripped up puff jacket :
tickling the larynx : feathers
and sparkling : a quiet : is
finally garbage : ready
to fly away
welcome to the dark side
energy good
you can eat with my face
Copyright © David Bradford, Dream of No One But Myself, Brick Books, 2021