CLAIRE CONSIDERS

CLAIRE CONSIDERS Glass Cabin by Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel

Glass Cabin (Pulley Press April 2024) is a singularly beautiful book, radiant with life affirming prose and poetry from husband-and-wife team Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel. In alternating voices, Jim and Tina tell a vivid, engaging story of how they built a house. Not just any house, mind you, but a cabin constructed in the wilds of Alabama on a place called Hydrangea Ridge. Neither were experienced construction workers or builders, but rather they are educators, poets, and writers. Yet they built the cabin with their own hands—although as they acknowledge gratefully, they did so with the help of friends. In building, they utilized discarded church glass, reclaimed painted tin, storm snapped power poles, and other recycled and salvaged materials. Their poetry is accessible, full of sensory impact, and luminous, and their prose crisp with a blend of insight and storytelling magic.

It took Jim and Tina Braziel thirteen years to build their glass cabin. Much of that time, they were living in the unfinished structure in what they called “luxury camping” as they built the cabin. In “Always and Absolutely,” Jim wrote: “Know that we didn’t set out to design a house of glass, / and we know the story of stones. We built what is ours from what / others handed down for free.” In “February Prayer,” he notes “The days are a list of what to do, of the cabin / shifting into home.”

Both Jim and Tina are empathetic writers who capture raw truths with telling details and evocative descriptions. In both their voices, and with an intimacy that’s touching, tender, and personal but never cloying, they invite us into their first attraction to their growing love, from the first dance to their leap of faith into marriage, and through the challenges of building the home.

In an introduction, Jim writes of how “I fell in love with her at the 280 Boogie where we danced to band after band all afternoon. …Tina knows how to turn a dress, and I’m crazy about her.” In turn, Tina tells Jim in her poem “Hive Step,” how in “Even our first dance / I took your measure / as true…” In her poem titled, “I Married Him Before He Got the Roof On,” Tina celebrates their marriage and their move into the cabin before it was finished with such lines as “Married him before June, / before he said we’re moving / come September even if / we live in a tent. …

Before I learned measuring / twice and cutting once / never guarantees getting it right. …Yes, I married him / before I got how all in / all is.”

The building of the cabin and the building of their relationship are intimately entwined. In “Sun-Drenched” Tina writes of “our love” as a “place we spread quilt, carry / cooler, see sky as ceiling, / a nowhere place we make ourself / a home.” Jim in turn notes in “The Subfloor Blues” that “This is love. This is home.” In “Refuge,” he speaks of “the full / moon’s penny above the skylight I built. / So you could see out, I set a piece of glass across this wooden box.” The same poem reflects how he turns “trying not to miss what you find beautiful.”

Among the hardships and challenges revealed in the collection, perhaps none is more profound than the water issues. Jim explains “Digging a well for a single homestead meant churning 300, 400, as much as 700 feet through chert, which took a lot of patience, pipe, and money.” Given that, “We talk about gutters and a cistern—that’s the dream.” But until then, instead, they buy and bring water to the cabin. “So I know the time it takes to haul and carry water. And I know the weight of it, how much is needed to wash hands and clothes and clean a body of the dirt and sawdust and sweat of each day.” Given the work involved in every drop of water they must haul before using, when Jim turns a “faucet on in a store restroom or someone’s house, water shoots out so fast, I jump. I try to wash my hands quick to stop it from disappearing.”

In building and living in their glass cabin, the two do their best to step lightly through the natural world. Tina saves tadpoles in drying puddles, Jim place lizards in trees to save them from the dog and cat, and Tina rescues trapped butterflies as she describes in “Hinge.”

Mornings we woke to butterflies banging

their slender bodies against panes

we had framed. They could not fathom light

could lie, mean anything but open path.

I offered my hand, carried each out,

feeling thin feet softly tap my palm,

watching wings hinge open and close,

until they lifted iridescence to sun.

While currents of love might dominate, there is also a theme of usefulness—or of being useful. In “Bending Tin,” a friend gifts them old tin from a camp house, “tin, he and his father had painted so it / wouldn’t rust out and could still be of use.” Jim’s father salvages glass panes from his church and they carefully clean the panes until there is “nothing to see but through” though they save “Pop’s palmprint / from the Sunday he raised his hand to claim church panes for us.” Power poles snapped by storms find a new usefulness as wood for the cabin and dead trees left to cure will become rafters. Even the poets seek to be useful—Tina in “Woodhenge,” digging fence posts “wanting to prove / [her] worth” and Jim in “After Work in the Last Week of July” pledging to “get more done. Maybe sweat / enough to make heat into cold, bring light into me.”

All in all, this is a profoundly appealing book, and it’s fascinating with its clear plot line of building a home by hand in an environment that often did not make this easy. They offer a glossary of terms, plus graphics and photographs including the cover collage curtesy of Jim’s son Dylan. It’s a book to be devoured, and then re-read and savored. Jim and Tina are both exceptional chroniclers and writers of great talent. Don’t miss this one.

James and Tina Mozelle Braziel are a husband-and-wife writing team. They have received fellowships from Hot Springs National Park and Alabama State Council on the Arts. James’s book, This Ditch-Walking Love (Livingston Press), winner of the Tartt Fiction Award, tells the stories of people living on Alabama’s Cumberland Plateau. His novels Birmingham, 35 Miles (Bantam) and Snakeskin Road (Bantam) are about the survivors of an environ-mental disaster in the future South. James is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University. Tina is the author of Known by Salt (Anhinga), winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and Rooted by Thirst (Porkbelly). Her work has appeared in POETRY and other journals. Tina directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon.