71 pages
Published 2021
Read August 9
Rating: 4 out of 5
The back cover calls this collection “A haunting ossuary of tiny poems,” which is such a precise phrase that I’m quoting it instead of trying to come up with my own description.
To pile onto the bone metaphor, these poems are delicate yet hard-edged — articulations of queer identity, the marrow of blasphemous sensuality, fragile remains of ghosts, the violent reshaping of bodies through trauma and power. Skulls are collected by bigoted scientists who cage with categories. Ribs shape into valleys. Hips are widened for childbearing, “Because even our bones are made for what men want.” Jaws are fractured in domestic violence. “Hiding our hearts is easy when we have so many bones,” Walrath informs us in “Sternum.”
But of course this collection is knotted together with ropes of embodiment, knit with nerves, flush with desire and the heat of skin. Most of all it is flooded with ghosts: ghosts of those lost, ghosts of lost selves, ghosts inflicted upon us by traumas to myriad to anatomize.
A running list of favorites:
“Cranium”
“there are few places left”
“where the demon’s tongue”
“no one else will remember”
“to love so much your body changes”
“there’s only this”
“Sacrum”
“there’s a town born underwater”
“when you leave me”
“you hold a light up to your teeth”
“have you ever crushed”
“Calcaneus”
“and sometimes I pray for you I can’t help it”
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