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Wound from the Mouth of a Wound
- Poems
- Narrated by: torrin a. greathouse
- Length: 1 hr and 32 mins
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Wound from the Mouth of a Wound
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Publisher's Summary
A Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Poetry
A CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Poetry
A Bustle Best Book of 2020
A Refinery29 Best New Book of Fall 2020
“Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.” Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates “buckteeth & ulcer.” She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.
These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. “I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.”
Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse—elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.
Additional recognition:
A New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Poetry Collection”
An NBC Out “Best LGBTQ Book to Gift This Holiday Season”
A Book Marks “Most Anticipated Poetry Collection of Fall/Winter 2020”
A Lambda “Most Anticipated LGBTQ Book of December 2020”
A Chicago Review of Books “Must-Read Book of December 2020”
What the critics say
"Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a densely packed treasure trove of verse. Bodies rise up here as sites of gender, trauma, ability, and violence. A gut punch you won't soon shake off, this is one of 2020's absolute best releases."—Bustle, “The Best Books of 2020”
“Sometimes, if I’m lucky, every year or so, there is a poetry collection that completely floors me, unnerves me, and opens my eyes by sheer force of words. May I introduce you to Wound From the Mouth of a Wound? . . . Each page, each sentence, surprises and cuts deep and will keep you reading, unable to turn away.”—Kate Layte, Papercuts J.P., in BuzzFeed’s “42 Great Books To Read This Spring, Recommended By Our Favorite Indie Booksellers”
“In [greathouse's] debut, they so brilliantly render emotion and empowerment in the context of transness, disability, and art that it leaves the reader breathless. There is a dazzling deftness to greathouse’s simultaneous construction and destruction of poems, bodies, life, that makes this collection unforgettable.”—Book Marks, “Most Anticipated Poetry Collections of Fall/Winter 2020”