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 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 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 dysmorphic-from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud's famed patient Dora. Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited contact-of 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