Wild Tongue

by Seiferle, Rebecca

• ISBN13: 9781556592621
• ISBN10: 1556592620
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-01
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Pr

Summary

"With a bitter and withering irony and an eye for shocking beauty . . . Seiferle cuts straight to the emotionally honest kernel within family, spirit and myth."- Publishers Weekly Poet Rebecca Seiferle once said that "one should always read a poem as if it was a matter of life and death." Seiferle's fourth book of poems, Wild Tongue, suggests a simi-lar belief about writing poems. The tongue is both voice and body, and Wild Tongue rages against these global bits, bridles, and palliatives that attempt to calm and control. Combining shocking beauty and compelling directness, Seiferle counterbalances divorce and domestic violence with newfound love and cathartic wit. Her poems, like cave drawings, are inspired by urgency and concern, working into the cracks and contours of truth and wound. So, it came to this, she could barely bear to be touched, though she was glad for that moment in the kitchen, tense with containers, scrapings of delicacies adhering, floating in the sink, and the other woman who turned and walked toward her, holding out her arms, extended from her shoulders, those most human wings, to gather her up . . .

Table of Contents

"The wild is not destitute of flavor"	p. 3
Black Water	p. 6
The Social Kiss	p. 7
Year of the Snake	p. 9
Those Greek warriors	p. 10
The Warrior for Life	p. 11
True darkness is as rare as god	p. 13
Elephant Memory	p. 15
Not a War Song	p. 17
Ghost Riders in the Sky	p. 18
The Poem	p. 19
The Anecdote	p. 21
A Table Full of Wasps	p. 23
"Love my enemies, enemy my loves"	p. 25
Ancestral Refrain	p. 26
Sexual Disgust	p. 27
Make your own garden	p. 29
Dragon Hill	p. 33
Wild Tongue	p. 34
Oh give me your hand and draw me up ...	p. 39
A for antigone	p. 40
Eye Center	p. 50
The Canary	p. 52
Dogheart Dharma	p. 54
Fraternity	p. 55
"Onward Christian Soldiers"	p. 56
The Butterfly Effect	p. 57
Ruined Pastoral	p. 59
The Too Long Married Woman	p. 60
Apache Tears	p. 62
The Wound of Being	p. 63
Taxonomy of Angels	p. 64
Before Being Numbed	p. 67
The Profane, the Miraculous Hand	p. 69
That Domestic Animal	p. 71
Wearing the Horns	p. 72
We should have turned back	p. 75
He was falling down a precipice	p. 76
The Craft	p. 78
Why I Am Glad That You Call Me Wicked	p. 80
Beyond Ithaca	p. 82
Night Music	p. 83
The First Person	p. 91
Fire in a Jar	p. 92
Revision: Medusa's Gaze	p. 93
Oh tell me why	p. 97
The Avatar of Immanence	p. 98
In the Vocative	p. 101
"Don't cast your pearls before swine"	p. 102
The chimaera	p. 103
X	p. 104
Editorial Advice	p. 105
Thieves of Fire	p. 107
If this were a romance you were writing	p. 108
But it's a room of silent looms	p. 110
"The erotic is the spark in the tinder of knowing"	p. 113
According to the myth	p. 115
And I am the flower thief	p. 116
White of snow or white of page is not	p. 117
The Black Dress	p. 119
The Fragments of Holderlin	p. 120
The burn that the oven rack scorched into	p. 129
Muse of Translation	p. 130
Isolate, you mean to be inviolable	p. 132
In an Atavistic Country	p. 133
There is no garden here	p. 134
Tree of Words	p. 137
After John Donne's "The Dreame"	p. 138
Salt River	p. 139
On the Island of Bones	p. 140
She invents	p. 157
The Shearing	p. 158
"Fiction Weaving"	p. 159
Stuck on the Roof	p. 163
After two years, you say only ...	p. 165
When the universe looks into the eye, its gaze	p. 168
Unknowing	p. 169
The empty hand	p. 174
Don't Sing Me a Song of Conquest	p. 175
In the Name of the Tyrant	p. 177
In that language, "we two" is a first person dual pronoun	p. 178
Until the Cuticles Bleed	p. 189
Love forced to be bodiless	p. 190
City Bombarded with Icicles	p. 192
The Heart Might as Well Be a Freight Train	p. 196
How many fires	p. 198
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.