Glass Armonica
Poems
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Milkweed Editions
Published:19th Dec '13
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An "exquisitely crafted" third collection of poems, this winner of the second-annual Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry offers a "prismatic portrait of the female body in the act of being touched" (G.C. Waldrep) The 18th-century glass armonica, a musical instrument whose sound emits from rotating water-filled vessels, has long held the power to mesmerize with its hauntingly sorrowful tones. Just as its song, which was once thought to induce insanity, wraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voices of historical female "hysterics" and inciting in readers a tranquil unease. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic -- from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud's famed patient, Dora. And like expert hands placed gently on the armonica's rotating disks, Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited human contact -- of hands laid upon the female body, of touch at times unwanted, and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysteric's "locked jaws." Winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Dunham's stunning third collection is "lush yet septic" (G.C. Waldrep), at once beautiful and unnerving.
WINNER OF THE 2013 LINDQUIST & VENNUM PRIZE FOR POETRY "Rebecca Dunham's Glass Armonica is a beautifully crafted collection of poems--each an exquisite glass vase filled with water--that refuse stasis. They are alive with a kind of vision that transforms detail into world-changing meditations on the self, the body, and trauma--and the power dynamics behind ideas and methods of what a cure might mean." --American Microreviews "Dunham's searing third collection glows like a magma vent underwater. These exquisitely crafted poems offer a prismatic portrait of the female body in the act of being touched: the eponymous vessel, half-filled with water, that sounds when struck. Dido is here, and Elizabeth Bishop; Lavinia Dickinson and Gertrude Stein; Daphne du Maurier and the women treated for 'hysteria' by ninteenth-century male physicians. In the title sequence--a sonnet crown--the speaker recalls being sexually molested at summer camp when she was ten, and the long legacy of silence that particular touch evoked. Here is photography and the speculum, the unpeeling and the razor held to the skin, the braiding of hands and 'the bandage lovingly applied.' Dr. Franz Mesmer plays his star female patient 'like a glass armonica, pull[ing] tone upon / tone from her, for hours.' 'Not beauty,' these lush yet styptic poems remind us, but 'ravaging need / --its strange and sudden
ISBN: 9781571314666
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 141g
96 pages