Acts of Contortion

In poems that are by turns witty, lush, and unflinching, Acts of Contortion explores the gestures of both hurtfulness and compassion. Whether set in a shelter for battered women, in the midst of a political demonstration, or at the center of an orchestra, the poems pursue the place of language in an injurious world. The political conscience at work is feminist, pacifist, and at odds with itself. Anna George Meek finds that the brutal and the compassionate are sometimes indistinguishable, born of our need to make contact outside of ourselves. These gestures—of music, of touch, of poetry—appear in the poems as the violin, domestic abuse, and words to comfort a woman in pain. The poems argue: difficult yet imperative, the attempt to gesture beyond ourselves is an act of contortion.

Anna George Meek is a freelance violinist, violin teacher, and instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis; she has also spent several years working as crisis intervention staff at a domestic violence shelter.  Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and other journals.  She received an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University and an M.A. in English from Indiana University, where she was a 1995 recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize.  This is her first book.