Tongue Tied Woman
Synopsis:
from the Foreward by Justin Spring
I liked Tongue Tied Woman. I liked the title, I liked the idea, I liked the poems. Using a repeated theme or refrain in a collection is a difficult trick to pull off. The hook has to be rich enough, deep enough, to continue to attract our attention over a good length of time. Jeanetta Calhoun's repeated theme and refrain, "tongue tied woman" is a hook up to the task. Much of her success has to do with the fact that she treats the phrase carefully and resists misusing it. It's a wonderful metaphor of the act of creating poems as well. After all, isn't that what poetry is all about: becoming untongue-tied? Letting the Muse speak. For poets of genius it happens quite easily. The rest of us have to work at it.
Book Excerpt:
tongue tied woman learns love
and its repercussions
tongue tied woman spins through the air
searching for a place to land
it is never enough, love and its repercussions
tongue tied woman knows that the end of a
sentence is as difficult as its beginnings
the rhythm of ugliness rises from the first effort
the rhythm of loneliness from the second
tongue tied woman never learns the proper timing
linguistics is the challenge, the semantics of the exact word
the exact time
the exact person
having explored both sexes, tongue tied woman wonders
if she falls somewhere in between, in a wasteland
of nothingness, an agony of unknowing
a curl on the back of the neck, a red beard, the
milky white swell of breasts tender and warm
tongue tied woman belongs to none of these
tongue tied woman is lost in translation
Author Comment:
Tongue Tied Woman is out-of-print, but you can read it as a virtual book hosted by Issuu.com: http://issuu.com/jlcmish/docs/tonguetiedwoman
Topics/Categories:
Relationships, womanhood, Women
Genre:
Type of Work:
Awards:
2001 Edda Poetry Chapbook for Women Prize
Original Publish Date:
February 13, 2009
- Share With:
