Overview

Told in six parts, Things I Didn't Do with This Bodysings in myriad voices and forms-ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness. Bedecked in Fenty and Shalimar, Amanda Gunn's startling debut,Things I Didn't Do with This Body, invites you to read with all of your senses and gives fresh meaning to the phrase a body of work. Told in six parts, this collection sings in myriad voices and forms-ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness. Both tender and emotionally raw, these poems interweave explorations of family and interrogations of history, including an unforgettable sequence that meditates on the life of Harriet Tubman. With Tubman's portrait perched above her writing desk, Gunn pens poems that migrate from South to North, from elegy to prayer, from borrowed shame to self-acceptance. Writing with frankness and honesty, Gunn finds no thought, no memory, too private: a father's verbal blow, a tense visit to a gynecologist's table, the longing to be ""erased/by a taxi at 50 miles an hour,"" and grief at the loss of two former lovers, decades apart. Death is familiar here, yet we find softness, grace, and hope in the culinary lessons learned in warm family kitchens, in the communal laughter of a rehab center's common room, and in the rewards and pleasures of the fat erotic. With poems as malleable as the skin that ""misplaced one hundred nine pounds"" and filledit again, Gunn proves that, for the Black body, memory often presentsthe heaviest weight. Things I Didn't Do with This Body is a reminder that ""carried in the body is the future, the present, and the past."" The most capable thing a body can do is remember and bear it and live.

Full Product Details

9781556596582

Table of Contents

Reviews

Gunn's formal decisions enable a reader to feel and think with and through her...While embodiment is a through-line, her poems explore (and interweave) subjects that include race, gender, sexuality, history, nationhood, family, illness, cognition, pleasure, and shame. Gunn's is a poetics both carefully studied and wildly intuitive, a language of both pyrotechnics and searing flame. --Dora Malech

"""Here is another deeply intimate collection of poems, this one a debut from Amanda Gunn. Broken into six parts, one for each of the senses, the voices and forms change drastically from page to page. These poems feel very much in the body, the body of Gunn and the body of the reader, all at once. They also explore and interrogate the history of race in America.""—Book Riot ""Gunn’s formal decisions enable a reader to feel and think with and through her…While embodiment is a through-line, her poems explore (and interweave) subjects that include race, gender, sexuality, history, nationhood, family, illness, cognition, pleasure, and shame. Gunn’s is a poetics both carefully studied and wildly intuitive, a language of both pyrotechnics and searing flame.""—Dora Malech"

Author Information

Amanda Gunngrew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as a PhD candidate in English at Harvard where she studies poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Her recent work appears inPoetry,Los Angeles Review of Books QuarterlyJournal, andNarrative Magazine.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available