Femme’s Dictionary
Carol Guess
In an exquisite and powerful first collection of poetry Carol Guess blends musical language with social commentary. Her poems focus on the lives of women struggling to put words to the unspeakable.Watercolor: Leda The swan nestles his beak between the woman’s smallish breasts. His wings curve like orchards,or the broad flaps of planes that seared acres of sky in the early months of the last noticeable war. Returning from the front, a man lays his head between his lover’s breasts, listening for the heart nestled among orchards of skin and bone.He lets scars drift from him like petals.He pretends he can forget acres of names.The most noticeable thing in the picture is the quiet of the woman’s lips as the bird comes to her, and she pretends she will forget warm breath to breast, beast-touch. But everything returns to haunt, like obscene pictures, like the heart of the swan, beating a rhythm out beneath winged ribs. The murmur of push or drop through the bird’s heart flaps, the murmur of beautiful, dead men in their last flights returns and it is like the return of the planes at night, when someone’s war has just begun to drop. The soldier lets his thoughts nestle among the rhythms of the early front. The woman rests her forehead between wingspread hands,and the old hopes drift like petals shaken from boughs in pre-war orchards, before the great planes seared their trunks with scars, obscenely small, like names.Carol Guess is the author of two novels and a memoir. Her poetry is published in Poetry Northwest, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, and Bakunin, among others. Her novel Switch was a finalist for the ALA GLBT Award. She teaches at Western Washington University and lives in Seattle.
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Details
| ISBN | 9780934971867 |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Publication Date | 01-Nov-04 |
| Publisher | Calyx Books |
| Format | Trade Paperback |
| No. of Pages | 80 |
| Notes | Lambda Literary Award Finalist |
| Language | English |
| Rating | Good |
| Subject | Women – Poetry |
| BookID | 3915 |
