Trio

Trio exemplifies how women become a clandestine conduit for life, power, and loss, particularly in the shadow of an implacable patriarchy. Between two covers are three books: Planet Parable by Karen Donovan, Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull by Diane Raptosh, and Endless Body by Daneen Wardrop. The poems in Planet Parable discover unexpected meaning in the quotidian recorded against the revelatory background hum of the world. Diane Raptosh’s collection brings to life one of America’s most controversial suffragists, Victoria Woodhull, giving a voice to her immediate circle. Daneen Wardrop’s Endless Body realises a mother-daughter-mother lineage through music, quest, and a growing awareness of the body of the world as it traces a daughter’s loss of her mother, and the turning from loss to the arrival of that daughter’s own daughter. The body may never have assented to its own stern conditions, yet has many callings: tensing, speaking vapour, holding anger and, sometimes, letting us go.