Spitting Image (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) - Softcover

Van De Graaf, Kara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809336626 ISBN 13: 9780809336623

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Kara van de Graaf’s debut collection heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary poetry. Through poems that balance personal recollection with ekphrasis, science, and meditation, Van de Graaf searches for answers in the fluctuating relationship between the body and the self.
 
Taking as its primary theme the exploration of the female body in current culture, Spitting Image considers the myriad intersections of the body and gender, desire, relationships, and otherness. Van de Graaf interrogates underrepresented elements of the female experience, especially the physical, rhetorical, and aesthetic limitations of fatness in poetry and other arts. She then complicates those limitations through her use of innovative forms and imaginative verse, implicitly calling for poetry to engage with the female form in fresh ways. Throughout, Van de Graaf’s poems ask: In a time where we have more agency to define ourselves than ever before, what barriers still remain? What do our bodies mean to who we are?
 
At turns oblique and direct, Van de Graaf’s poems strive to create space for themselves not only in the field of contemporary poetry but also in a larger world that has been prone to ignoring or shaming women for their bodies. That these poems succeed on both counts is a testament to this remarkable new poet, who claims “That millimeter of space that means / all of us are apart, that means / we can never really touch / anything. . . . Yes, I want that, too.”
 

About this title

About the Author

Kara van de Graaf is the recipient of the Hoepfner Literary Award and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, among other honors. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Best New Poets 2010. She is a cofounder and an editor of Lightbox Poetry and an assistant professor of English at Utah Valley University.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

POEM ON THE VERGE OF INTERRUPTION

Things keep happening. I keep sewing
the seam of the ripped shirt, the needle

sawing back and forth, its slow way
of binding. The cardinal flying,

the sound of traffic on the avenue,
drivers muted in their cars, safe

behind glass. And you in the kitchen
at the big basin washing potatoes,

the brush back and forth until they're clean,
until they hardly have skin at all. Things

keep happening. No one stops anyone else
on the street, no one notices small signs:

the light bulb stuttering out, a flash of red
blowing across the sidewalk, the subtle,

unnoticeable coming of silence, easily,
like the movement into sleep. My palm

working, the silver needle. The raw potatoes
glistening in the basin, clean and white as eyes.


SONNET WITH A WISHBONE IN THE THROAT

I trussed the hen and cut the breast
clean, pliable, soft with cartilage.
I thought my mouth could swallow it
whole, but the bone went brittle, broke
through the skin of my neck like two
thorns. Its prongs scissored out above
my clavicle. Windpipe split in a perfect Y.
When I speak, each phrase kaleidoscopes,
modifies, a duet of whispers I lip into air.
I sound sweet when I want to be bitter. I bite
back my anger's flare. My voice box grows
into an echo chamber, buzzes double-alive.
Forgive me, I must say everything twice:
once to punish, once to entice.


PORTRAIT OF MY MOTHER AS THE VIRGIN QUEEN

Above all, what I have feared is love.
I have been afraid of my body, of its weakness,
its need that feels like a pail filling slowly
with milk. I have watched kids at the teat,

how their mouths are formed to pull
every sweetness toward them, to suck
the body tired, the nipple raw and jewel-like.
Who would choose such a bitter ornament?

Who could understand a creature that gladly
admits anything that arrives at its gates?
I have put my hand to the soft stomach
of a doe, and I have heard her throat

bleating in the labor. I prefer to let the rod
do my speaking. I prefer to let them call my name.


THE DOUBLES

In the dressing room at Macy's,
I run into all my old bodies.
We are reunited when I hear them
shuffling in the walls, sense them
beneath the dirty carpet. Their hips
lurching out of drywall. Their breasts
swelling against the concrete floor.
I congratulate one on her thin legs.
We commiserate about side-boob.
We try on dresses from the junior's section
and laugh. Relive our proms, our red-haired
date who cried the whole night
about that other girl. We kiss. Arm-wrestle.
Bitch-slap. Wish we were never born.
When we part we look at each other longingly,
doe-eyed. The way two mirrors,
when you put them opposite, reflect
each other forever and ever.

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809336626
• ISBN 13: 9780809336623
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80