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.