Embouchure
poems
Published on 21. March 2021
115 pages
978-1-62922-214-1 (ISBN)
Description
An embouchure is the way in which a wind musician applies their mouth to an instrument''s mouthpiece, and Embouchure, Emilia Phillips''s fourth poetry collection, sets its mouth, ready to play. Trumpeting a picaresque coming out story, the poems are at turns self-deprecatory and revelatory, exploring sexual fluidity and non-monosexuality. From the speaker''s adolescent crushes to her closeted 20s to her eventual acceptance of queerness, her disarming joy-even at her own mistakes-is cut with challenges to toxic masculinity and reckonings with anticipatory anxiety. The tomboy the speaker once was is transfigured into "a presexual soft butch / Medusa" with a "beautiful, beautiful / body that didn''t know yet // how to contain itself." Elsewhere, the speaker evades a Dickinsonian personification of Death, who seems more like an inescapable ex-boyfriend than a welcome bridegroom. Phillips''s mock-confessionalism is as brassy as it is vulnerable.
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Content
- Cover
- Copyright
- Contents
- Dedication
- Age of Beauty
- My Mother Confessed i was Conceived to Ravel's "Boléro"
- The Cast, in Order of Appearance
- My First Kiss was in a Room where they Polish Lenses for Eyeglasses
- The First Boy i thought i Loved was in a Band called Romanticide
- The Only thing i Learned Working at an Italian Restaurant for that one Week when i was Eighteen was
- They called me Unladylike
- A Kind of Second Virginity
- That Time my Mother and i were Photographed for Woman's World Magazine with our Cat Oreo Nursing on our Cocker Spaniel Ginnie,
- Hyperbole is Underrated
- To the Boy i caught Rummaging through my Panty Drawer During my Fifteenth Birthday Party
- My Childhood Dog Jessie once ate a Box of 120-Count Crayolas and Shat Speckled Rainbows for a Week
- "You should write a Poem about that," they say
- Poem about Death Beginning with a Humblebrag and Ending with a Shower Beer
- Memento Doloris
- Deep Calls to Deep
- To the Young Man who always Sat Quietly in the back of the First Literature Class i Ever Taught, who gave me a Poem Comparing me to a Commonly Hunted Bird
- One of the First Girls on whom i had a Crush was Named Hope
- I wanted to be Patrick Swayze, not Jennifer Grey
- Scabs
- Pathetic Fallacy
- When the Phlebotomist Stuck the Needle in me, i looked away only to see a TV on which a Chef was Injecting Pork Loin with Marinade
- This Beautiful thing is Making me so Depressed
- Haha-Boohoo
- At a Party a Woman Introduced herself to me as Dawn
- Plaster Cast
- My OB/GYN Suggests i Consider Cosmetic Labiaplasty,
- At Home Alone, in my Underwear and new Strap-On
- Doesn't Matter who you are or what you do, Something in the world will make a fool of you
- I Used to get Boys to Kiss me by Bragging about my Embouchure
- Some Sentences need to be Written in the Passive Voice
- To my Father, who Closed his Eyes and Ran Toward me with an Outstretched Towel when i came back on the beach at Mobile Unaware one of my New Boobs had Slipped my Bikini Triangle
- I Tried to write a Poem called "Impostor Syndrome" and Failed
- At Eleven, I Described an Aging, Female Celebrity to my Father as Looking "Rode Hard and put up Wet"
- Poppies and Field Flowers
- I am Alive Today because of the Tree in Front of my Bedroom Window
- The Ants Weigh more than the Elephants
- Confirmation Bias
- Wish Against Chekhov's Gun
- I have Anxiety about Anxiety
- My Dog Refused to go Near the Dead Rabbit in the Backyard
- Butterfly-Shaped Organ
- Bloodwork
- My Neighbor's Working out to Christian Pop Music in her Front Yard during a Pandemic
- I think about the Time my Weather Radio Forecasted "Although the Sky will be Overcast your House will Still be Filled with Light"
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
