Pitt Poetry Series

A rebuttal to Aeschylus’s <i>Oresteia</i>, <i>Every Form of Ruin</i> posits the Erinyes’ fury as righteous, understanding Clytemnestra’s rageful response to loss, and refusing Iphigenia’s relegation to a footnoted sacrifice. A fierce and darkly funny examination of anger, these lyrical poems push back against silencing by playing witness to a world where the experiences of women, nonbinary, and femme-identifying people are too often ignored, their responses dismissed as hysterical. These poems are also investigations into the loneliness of midlife; the search for one’s own self when that self has given its life to service. <i>Every Form of Ruin</i> counters our culture’s erasure of women and resists the categorizations of maiden, mother, crone by blurring those distinctions through the creation of voices that are moved by rage and resistance.<br><br><br><b>BLACK THUMB</b><br><br>The dogwood was threatening<br>to swallow the back garden’s light,<br><br>so I borrowed a chainsaw and gas. <br>Its last berries a memory of red, the fruit<br><br>bitter, tiny angry mangos in the mouth<br>of its killer. Nights my son chooses his father <br><br>to read him into silence, I practice not loving<br>anything. Less like learning than remembering.<br><br>As a child, I studied how to be a child.<br>I was given a doll to care for <br><br>but could never remember its name.<br>I left her face down everywhere.