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Tupelo PressThe Flight Cage
$16.95
Paperback Original ISBN: 978–1–932195–87–3 SynopsisRebecca Dunham’s thrilling new book is a multilayered account of the struggles and torments faced by women as wives, mothers, and daughters — a psychological journey in which the poet seeks communion with writers from the past, including feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft.Using the metaphor of a “flight cage,” where birds are held captive, as physical manifestation of the space from which her speakers address us, Dunham reinvigorates the persona poem. Instead of “performing” historical figures such as Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, Anna Akhmatova, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she invites them to inhabit her, flickering in and out of sight, refusing an easy artifice. A virtuoso of the phrase and image, Dunham displays a daring range of prosody. Drawing upon Wollstonecraft’s experimental travel narrative, the poet creates a threshold upon which the traditional “crown of sonnets” can be opened to the sudden breakage of collaged text, remaking both the received form and the now-conventional contemporary experimental poem. Advance praise for The Flight Cage: In her second collection of poetry, Rebecca Dunham, with stunning formal innovation, parses the blessings and afflictions of womanhood, of motherhood. These poems, brilliant on their surfaces, dark and grave in their depths, will startle the reader with their radiance, and haunt — ghost-ridden as they are — with their otherworldly gravity.—Eric Pankey Dunham’s poems are far more than history lessons, for they make their own radical claims on our attention, and their complex tapestry-like ways of making — interweaving the formal and organic, the mimetic and improvisational — make this an enormously compelling reading experience.—Sherod Santos Over and over, this book returns to the body. While acknowledging that ‘the body's surest form is loss,’ the poems in The Flight Cage celebrate the place of the body in the world. As Dunham insists, ‘This is not lament, but refrain. / Knock on it and it will sing.’ These poems sing and dazzle.—Nicole Cooley Selected PoemsEncaged, As by God’s Good Rage –Sarah Good, 1692, to her daughter Dorcas and a nursing baby I never set some broken knife’s steel blade to the afflicted, even as teal tight, they flocked the pews, twisted eel- like and crying. Milk daughters, I harbor you, my own two yellow birds. Burr my flesh, my familiars. Suck the meat or sweat from between my fingers and spile me. Dorcas Good, I forgive you your pile of lies, the suckling snake you claim I gave you, its flea-sized bite’s red mark. Listen, little nameless one. Do not arc and squirm away. I am no more rock for woman to pitch against woman than witch or hag. Motherhood’s an omen that pricks and pinches, a needling in the gut, drenching us all in blood-soaked rags that we change in a privy’s oak dark shame, and oh, we are all afflicted. [Letter 3, from the sequence “A Short Residence”] Within these walls, our laundry fills my arms. In winter, they take the linen down to the river to wash it. My mother should have hated this chore, she did it so often. Hands, cut by ice, cracked and bleeding. White shirts lifted like snow geese from her dryer. My father’s arms made young again, wrinkles in the crotch of his pants erased and forgotten. Men will not disgrace their manhood by carrying a tub. This was forgiveness, smooth hot iron in hand. But Mother, knowing how not to burn the pale cotton is not knowing how to love. [Letter 6, from the sequence “A Short Residence”] He no longer cares, I know. Though there was a time when my lover looked at wet clay and all he could see was me, the bones of the world waiting to be clothed. To rub two sticks together and expect a spark is not a thing to be counted on in need. I saw the sun – and sighed. I pour myself a drink. It warms me more than any fire ever could. I cannot leave. My will and words reduced like a dark, caramel sauce upon the stove. Shut the flue. How sweetly it smokes. I left my little girl behind, mere stone and soil. Yet even as a child I was intoxicated by pain. [Letter 17, from the sequence “A Short Residence”] Rack of lamb: its barred cage breaks white through the cold and purpled meat. I bury garlic deep: dinner for two. Her name, I say, I want you to say her name. Then put her, please, on a bus away from here, swiveling on some bar stool in Chicago. O jealous eye, she has been here first. He denies it, blames the dehumidifier’s static hum. But we both know it’s gathered beads of her like a luke-warm wine for me to drink. Outside, the azaleas explode blue as her cotton shirt and heavy with her scent. She drifts in through the kitchen window to sit down beside us. An expected guest. Confinement Ghazal Like my great-aunt’s crochet hook, it is plastic. Slipping it in, the resident tugs and my legs flow slick with clay. In 1797, the body opened itself to science. Men fingered cadavers and sank wrists deep into birth canals, unclean. Restrained and in pain, we are built for labor, petty thieves straining amid our stained and russet bed-clothes. Mary Wollstonecraft shivers in sepsis, shaking. Then the puppies are on her, pulling milk from glutted breasts, eyes closed. Crotch shaved, chloroformed, they strap my mother down, slice her open, and pull me free, pinced in a metal claw. Push, Rebecca. The doctor readies his knives and it is as if the hand of God himself is there to set me screaming.Tupelo Press |