The Hotel Eden

"Madame Martin will throw back her shutters at eight…" With these words, Beverley Bie Brahic opens The Hotel Eden, a book about seeing the world. She moves through Paris, the French provinces, the American west coast, in the spirit of a flâneur, going about her daily life alert to the variety of human experience: the soup kitchens, the Luxembourg Gardens and the Latin Quarter, the refugees, works of art and areas of damage. The title poem pays a debt to Joseph Cornell, the master of the assemblage, whose "The Hotel Eden" discloses a stuffed parrot and other objects under glass. The eye—the poem—assembles them but cannot tell their intended story. It tells a story all the same. "On the tip of God’s tongue, the bird waits to be named." This is a book of revelatory indirections, of unexpected moons, creatures, rituals and histories, of days rich in full disclosures and hints of revelation.