The 18th-century glass armonica, a musical instrument whose sound emits from rotating water-filled vessels, has long held the power to mesmerize with its hauntingly sorrowful tones. Just as its song, which was once thought to induce insanity, wraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voice
WINNER OF THE 2013 LINDQUIST & VENNUM PRIZE FOR POETRY
Judged by G. C. Waldrep
"Reading Glass Armonica is akin to discovering the sharpness of bone shard or shrapnel risen just beneath the surface of one's skin: the odd advent of injury's return despite the appearance of a wound thought long healed.” -CATE MARVIN
"Dunham's searing third collection glows like a magma vent underwater. These exquisitely crafted poems offer a prismatic portrait of the female body in the act of being touched: the eponymous vessel, half-filled with water, that sounds when struck. Dido is here, and Elizabeth Bishop; Lavinia Dickinson and Gertrude Stein; Daphne du Maurier and the women treated for 'hysteria' by 19th-century male physicians. Here is photography and the speculum, the unpeeling and the razor held to the skin, the braiding of hands and 'the bandage lovingly applied.' Dr. Franz Mesmer plays his star female patient 'like a glass armonica, pull[ing] tone upon / tone from her, for hours.' 'Not beauty,' these lush yet styptic poems remind us, but 'ravaging need / -its strange and sudden // promise' flayed, 'field / of loosestrife threshed to a fine flame.'” -G. C. WALDREP
"These gracefully exquisite poems navigate brutality, intrepidly seeking its origins and end. 'The body does not discriminate,' writes Rebecca Dunham: the body intermingles weakness and strength. These physically intelligent poems lead toward durable understandings.” -JOAN MACKOWSKI
"Obliquely narrative, rich in lyric resonance and implicative catalog, the textured terms of Glass Armonica obtain an expansive portrait of the self as complex constellation, and in so doing oblige the reader's own collaborative intimacy, yielding a genuine eros whose necessarily troubled song continues its music well beyond the page.” -SCOTT CAIRNS
"A journey into the uncanny, into a poetic garden of earthly delights. The haunting title sequence, a crown of sonnets, weaves together multiple narratives, past and present, to investigate notions of hysteria, from the work of Jean-Martin Charcot to young girls at summer camp. In lush, gorgeous language, these poems both enchant and unsettle us.” -NICOLE COOLEY
milkweed editions
(800) 520-6455
