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Book SynopsisAn "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.
Trade ReviewWINNER 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 // promise' flayed, 'field / of loosestrife threshed to a fine flame.'" --G. C. Waldrep "Rebecca Dunham's stunning new collection, Glass Armonica, is a journey into the uncanny, into a poetic garden of earthly delights. The book's haunting title sequence, a crown of sonnets, weaves together multiple narratives, past and present, to investigate notions of hysteria, from the work of Jean-Martin Charcot to mesmerism to young girls at summer camp. In lush, gorgeous language, the poems in Glass Armonica both enchant and unsettle us." --Nicole Cooley "Obliquely narrative, rich in lyric resonance and implicative catalog, the textured terms of Dunham's Glass Armonica obtain an expansive portrait of the self as complex constellation, and in so doing oblige the reader's own collaborative intimacy, yielding a genuine eros whose necessarily troubled song continues its music well beyond the page." --Scott Cairns "Reading Rebecca Dunham's Glass Armonica is akin to discovering the sharpness of bone shard or shrapnel risen just beneath the surface of one's skin: the odd advent of injury's return despite the appearance of a wound thought long-healed. Face the holy and its unholy. Face the Error. Witness the pairing of Mystery and Woe, the equation of their shared vertigo. I'm pleased to report that every poem in this collection is wired to shatter its own lens on demand." --Cate Marvin Praise for The Flight Cage: "Stunning formal innovation." -- Eric Pankey "An enormously compelling reading experience." -- Sherod Santos "Near-hypnotic, and emotionally evocative." -- The Rumpus Praise for The Miniature Room: WINNER OF THE 2006 T.S. ELIOT PRIZE "Deeply melodious and intelligent." -- Naomi Shihab Nye
