Every Form of Ruin (eBook)

A Refutation of Silence and Choosing of Operatic Anger over Abuse and Marginalization<b></b>

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A rebuttal to Aeschylus’s <i>Oresteia</i>, <i>Every Form of Ruin</i> posits the Erinyes’ fury as righteous, understanding Clytemnestra’s rageful response to loss, and refusing Iphigenia’s relegation to a footnoted sacrifice. A fierce and darkly funny examination of anger, these lyrical poems push back against silencing by playing witness to a world where the experiences of women, nonbinary, and femme-identifying people are too often ignored, their responses dismissed as hysterical. These poems are also investigations into the loneliness of midlife; the search for one’s own self when that self has given its life to service. <i>Every Form of Ruin</i> counters our culture’s erasure of women and resists the categorizations of maiden, mother, crone by blurring those distinctions through the creation of voices that are moved by rage and resistance.


<b>BLACK THUMB</b>

The dogwood was threatening
to swallow the back garden’s light,

so I borrowed a chainsaw and gas.
Its last berries a memory of red, the fruit

bitter, tiny angry mangos in the mouth
of its killer. Nights my son chooses his father

to read him into silence, I practice not loving
anything. Less like learning than remembering.

As a child, I studied how to be a child.
I was given a doll to care for

but could never remember its name.
I left her face down everywhere.