The Hideous Hidden
Will be published approx. on 4. October 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-0-8112-2537-3 (ISBN)
Description
In her first full-length collection published in the United States, Sylvia Legris probes and peels, carves and cleaves, amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human and animal anatomy.
Starting with the Greek writings of Hippocrates and the Latin language of medicine, and drawing from Leonardo da Vinci's Anatomical Manuscripts, the dermatologist Robert Willan's On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Legris infuses each poem with unique rhythms that roll off the tongue. The Hideous Hidden boldly celebrates anatomy's wonders: "Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals. / Confess the gallbladder, / the glandular wallflowers, / the objectionable oblong spleen."
Starting with the Greek writings of Hippocrates and the Latin language of medicine, and drawing from Leonardo da Vinci's Anatomical Manuscripts, the dermatologist Robert Willan's On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Legris infuses each poem with unique rhythms that roll off the tongue. The Hideous Hidden boldly celebrates anatomy's wonders: "Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals. / Confess the gallbladder, / the glandular wallflowers, / the objectionable oblong spleen."
Reviews / Votes
"Rapidly gets deep and electric as the corded nerves running through the spinal channel." -- Lightsey Darst - Bookslut "In The Hideous Hidden, Legris performs a poetic autopsy that untethers the language of the body and its "hideous hidden" from the morgue, the medical lab, the anatomy book-spaces from which women for centuries were long excluded-and creates from the history and language of this body her own stranger thing." -- Adriana X. Jacobs - Music & Literature "Legris isn't interested in solving the "riddle of meat," preferring instead a jangling, sound-dense poetry that ruminates on the substance of the human body..." -- Shane Neilson - Poetry Magazine "Legris loves language, the way it radiates, not just for what it can say by syntactic regularity and accumulation, but for its cellular resonances." -- Open Letter "Her work crackles with exuberant wackiness." -- CBCMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Dimensions
Height: 201 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
91 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8112-2537-3 (9780811225373)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Sylvia Legris was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her collection Garden Physic was chosen as one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year by The (London) Times and CBC/Radio-Canada. Her other poetry collections include The Hideous Hidden, Pneumatic Antiphonal, and Nerve Squall, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.