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.

Poems.

Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Table of Contents -- Epigraphs -- Un vent pour écorner les bœufs -- The Light -- The Choosing -- A Woman, Behind the Camera? -- Good Color -- Out and Out -- Notes on Landscaping -- The Shower -- Good Pleat -- Trees -- The Plot -- Grape Juice -- Open ******* Question -- It's Too Late to Stop Now -- The Bat -- Lifted -- Lifting -- Jeff's Pretty Meh about That Shit Being Racist -- Nobody's Sleeping -- Why Can't We Live Together -- The Hair -- Fotomat -- Chain Link -- "Slick and the Dimples" -- The Sight -- Sweatshirt. Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars -- Even Ways of Looking at Nothing -- Spoon -- The Sandwich -- Fight Calendar -- Mom's Seafood Argument -- Breath -- New Here -- Exactly -- Strangers -- B#L -- The Mess -- The Cheap-Cheap Mall -- Les yeux dans graisse de bines -- The Gift -- Wipe -- Zoom Zoom -- Click -- Still -- The Other Men -- Sans Pate -- Sanga Howie -- The Sun Set -- 4411 -- Attention -- The Trick -- Loveseat -- Pitch -- The Warden at Fresh -- Walk and Talk -- Keep Breathing -- Seal -- The Dream -- Little Thing -- Cute Bear -- Notes -- Acknowledgments