Glass Armonica

The "exquisitely crafted poems" of this prize-winning collection weave together past and present to explore touch, trauma, and the female body (G.C. Waldrep).

The eighteenth-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 songwhich was once thought to induce insanitywraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voices of historical female "hysterics" and inciting in readers a tranquil unease.

These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphicfrom Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud's famed patient Dora. Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited contactof hands laid upon the female body, of touch at times unwanted, and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysteric's "locked jaws."

Winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry

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