Quiet Armor: Poems

New poetry from Stevie Edwards, author of Sadness Workshop Quiet Armor, the third full-length collection from poet Stevie Edwards, examines how capitalism and patriarchy impact romantic relationships and, more broadly, intimacy. Edwards considers the ways in which confessional performances of vulnerability can be coercive, whether popular culture encourages men to seek validation through sexual excess and aggression, and how we encourage women to be complicit in figurative and literal violence against other women. Drawing on historical and mythological figures—including Medusa, Persephone, Shakespeare’s Lavinia, Saint Agatha, and Saint Christina—Edwards builds a fierce investigation into how rape culture has shaped the literary canon, academia, and the world at large. She brings readers into the quiet and intimate spaces we create despite trauma—or perhaps even because of it. Ultimately, Quiet Armor seeks to reclaim positive intimacy, showing us not only the desperate battles but also the healing embraces. All the while, these poems ask us: What does the end of rape culture look like? How do we get there?

Table of Contents:
Parthenogenesis Window Shopping Easy as Pie Ladylike Nobody Is Lost What Is Left to Say About the Body Composed Portrait of My Mother, Age 56 Spell for Undoing a Life Sentence Essay on Guns Verity Clytemnestra, Daughter of Leda, Beholds a Swan Dream without Men Red Spell Mouthy Self-Portrait as Medusa Calling Her Names Elegy for Lavinia Five Days Before the Election Rumor Has It Drunk Bitch Dreams of a Luminous Stream Babylove Harm’s Way Drunk Bitch Wants to Fuck Like a Man After the Election I Woke Up What I Left Learning to Leave a Bad Thing Alone Drunk Bitch Tries Her Hand at Recovery Medusa with the Head of Harvey Weinstein The Astonishing A Few More Lines on Lavinia Some Things We Carried Medusa as Shield Dread Myth Some Lines in which I Want to Go On Aubade with the Longest Eyelashes On Progeny Some Threads from a Depression Ode to Chill Pills Self-Portrait as Too Much On Want All the Heavens Were a Bell Another Poem About Pain Dear Extraterrestrials Ode to Joy Entreaty Epithalamion Tapping Therapy Notes Acknowledgments Thank You

About the Author :
Stevie Edwards is a lecturer in the Department of English at Clemson University and poetry editor of the South Carolina Review. Her books and chapbooks include Sadness Workshop, Humanly, and Good Grief, and her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Review :
The poems in Quiet Armor explore the shadows and nuances of one woman teetering between conventional, gendered expectations and witch/martyr/saint/goddess. These poems unfold with improvisational energy, creating an ongoing sense of a life lived, of time passing, of wisdom accrued through experience. It is difficult to write of life’s reparations, especially where love is concerned, without sentimentality—here, Edwards succeeds, and how: when we reach the end of the last poem, we feel we know the collection’s speaker intimately, and we feel—some of us, anyway—known." - Diane Suess, author of frank: sonnets