Full Description
In this striking and nostalgic collection, Emily Rose Cole unearths the fragility and resilience of daughterhood through indelible imagery that evokes new senses of the body: swallowing keys, rain lashing eyelids, unzipping of flesh. Grieving self-portraits of historical and mythological women are woven with stirring recollections of struggling bodies and evocative spells to overcome them. Undulating with memories and magic, illness and death, these poems reveal how a single chance at life and loving can be both too much and not enough.
Her bed,from this angle, looks like an altar. Isaiah, when you wrote,
The wolf will live with the lamb, what did you mean?
Some days, cancer is the wolf. Some days, the wolf is Mama.
—excerpt from "Still Life with Lines from Isaiah"
Contents
Acknowledgments
Self-Portrait as Judy Garland
Part One
Spell for the Fissured Brain
Double Memory with Train
Imagined Snapshot: Morningstar Studios, 1988
Lent
Self-Portrait as Rapunzel
Lovebites
Prayer
In the Year of the Divorce, My Fascinations Include: Surrealism, the Dust Bowl and The Wizard of Oz
Protection Spell
Somewhere Brighter
Meditation with Infinity
Four Poisons
Premonition
Part Two
Spell for Courage
Self-Portrait as Persephone Returning
Passport
Another Premonition
Portrait: Mama as Demeter
Her Cancer into Harvest
Still Life with Lines From Isaiah
Snapdragons (I)
After the Transplant Fails, I Dream of Crocodiles
Hospice
All I Wanted
Nocturne with Witch & Desire
MRI, Barnes Jewish Hospital
Part Three
Spell for the Grief Song Scarred to Your Throat
At Her Funeral, Singing
What Makes a Pearl
Elegy with Hemlock & Cold Tea
Self-Portrait as Dorothy Gale
Love Poem to Risk
In Toulouse (I)
MS Nocturne Without a Magician
At Cimetere de Terre Cabade
Snapdragons (II)
The Night Before My Diagnosis Is Confirmed
In Toulouse (II)
How Not to Remember Your Mother
MS Nocturne with Fuse, Crosshairs and Irreprable Fissure
Dear Burglar
Love Poem to Injection-Site Reactions
Asked If I Miss My Mother, I Say I Miss the House
MS Nocturne According to Ecclesiastes
Love Poem to Myself
What I Didn't Call Her
