Description
Book SynopsisGives voice to abused children, murdered women, research animals, war veterans, and even metronomes and lampshades. In poems inspired by Ovid, Tina Carlson explores the roots of voicelessness and journeys into metamorphosis, granting speech to those ignored or victimized and thereby allowing them to provide witness to their own lives.
Trade ReviewTina Carlson's images are always palpable, surprising, their resonance almost too powerful for the page. What she does with those images, how she shapes and where she takes them, is an experience her readers won't forget. I am still catching my breath."—Margaret Randall, author of
Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises "Here lies a beauty great enough to capture and heal an aching heart, elegiac enough to canonize the lost. These poems cut a path lit by the ancestral flint of Carlson's scalpel. Stepping out into the light after the dark theater of these poems, one perceives more readily a world stripped of its skin, fed by their true seeing, their lazar gaze, and Carlson's own crooked smile, these the touchstones of her artistic reliquary."—Lise Goett, author of
Leprosarium"In
A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, vulnerable myths and porous pasts are 'blown open.' These poems unhinge for the reader a kind of nourishment. 'We were once specks of light,' Carlson writes, as she moves us toward illumination."—Lauren Camp, author of
Took House "These are the poems, poet Tina Carlson the guide we need at this crucial time in the inferno of our own making."—Carole Simmons Oles, author of
A Selected History of Her Heart: PoemsTable of Contents
- Backyard of Her Alphabets
- Ghost Town on Iris Avenue
- A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery
- My Mother as Moon
- Cigarette Smoke and a Blue Impala
- Gran Via
- Agoraphobia
- My Father Comes Home from War with Guns
- My Father Prayed
- Mud Babies
- The Embassy of Silence
- At the Rest Stop, Fully Gloved, She Calls Me Mommy
- You Will Dream that Great Aunt Dolor Loves Your Wild Hair
- Dark Dowry
- How holy the cloth sewn sidewise
- Sheltering in Place for Beginners
- Coat-Grave, Nation of Moths
- ALMA
- Anatomy of Silence
- Fin Feather Bark and Skin
- Day after America
- Metronome and Daruma Doll
- As Numbers of Dead Rise, Moths Fill the Room
- Lampshade and Floor Mat
- Turn the Ship Around
- Saint Ursula
- Heaven
- Snow Queen
- The Little Robber Girl
- Monster
- Open Your Mouth
- Why did you kill your wife, mr XYZ?
- Thirteen Children Rescued from Their Parents Testify
- Ice Matron
- West Side Murders, Seven Years Later
- How She Becomes a Fountain
- Every Bird in My Blood Has a Name
- Flo and the Frozen Girl
- Guest Place in the Shadow
- There I Stood, in All My Forms
- Until I Could No Longer Fly and So Became a Map: Pegasus
- From the Island of Pomegranates
- Pandora on the Mother Road
- Atlas
- There I stood begging at the door of my death
- I Fled the Dry Lips of Men
- Dermoid
- Dear Human,
- The Flying Boy
- Wearing His Father's Dog Tags
- Feathers Appear on Branches as Flame
- And When He Thought He Had Found Me
- In the Tree Museum
- The Painter
- Martia
- Avalanche
- Machu Picchu
- Notes
- Acknowledgements
