Rebecca Dunham

Glass Armonica

Rebecca Dunham

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. And like expert hands placed gently on the armonica’s rotating disks, Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited human 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, Dunham’s stunning third collection is “lush yet septic” (G.C. Waldrep), at once beautiful and unnerving.

Cold Pastoral

Rebecca Dunham

Socially engaged poetry—like Claudia Rankine's Citizen and M. NourbeSe Phillip's Zong!— have proven to have real sales potentialSadly, tragedies like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Katrina are becoming more and more regular, driving interest in different interpretations of environmental catastropheRebecca Dunham is one of our most well-published poets across journals and magazines, she is poised for a break-out book