Poetry.
Women's Studies.
Motherhood is bound both to life's joy and death's ether, which complicates a woman's relationship to her own body's emotional and physical permeablity.
In LOOK LOOK LOOK Callista Buchen writes beautiful prose fragments about and the tendrils that bind her to motherhood and that intersection with mortality.
This moving collection situates motherhood as a climate, a destination and reminds us that many of the connections bodies make are often as ephemeral as 'clouds made of mouths.
'--Carmen Gimenez Smith Drawing from surrealism, the grotesque, and even horror, Callista Buchen's LOOK LOOK LOOK explores how alien one's own body--one's own self--becomes through pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood.
In these prose poems, Buchen's mother-speaker 'build s] and dissolve s], ' is both 'double and half.
' The line between self and other, the line between construction and deconstruction, and ' t]he line between making and being made' have never felt so thin, so permeable.
This is a profound book of poems.
--Maggie Smith In this ravishingly honest collection of prose poems, Callista Buchen look look looks at every facet of mothering, from child loss to childbirth, from loss of self and alienation from the body to a hard-won and completely unsentimental empowerment--mother as process; 'mother as birthplace, where woman becomes location.
' The poems are often dimly lit as a diorama or a womb.
They embrace pregnancy's darkness, the monstrous cleaving of the birthing body, the milky flood of nursing, and the complex grief of the self that is estranged in the making of another human being.
The poems have the rhythm and image-centeredness of ritual; even the book's title is a trinity, suggesting the multifocality of women's experience and functioning as an entreaty for the reader to look, please.
When the speaker comes into her authority it arrives less with triumph than with danger: 'There isn't a dam you can build that I can't break.
Charisma, chiasma, p.
| Danger | There isnt a dam you can build that |
|---|
Black Lawrence Press Look look look, paperback/callista buchen
