Things I Didn't Do with this Body

Told in six parts, Things I Didn't Do with This Bodysings in myriad voices and forms-ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness. Bedecked in Fenty and Shalimar, Amanda Gunn's startling debut,Things I Didn't Do with This Body, invites you to read with all of your senses and gives fresh meaning to the phrase a body of work. Told in six parts, this collection sings in myriad voices and forms-ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness. Both tender and emotionally raw, these poems interweave explorations of family and interrogations of history, including an unforgettable sequence that meditates on the life of Harriet Tubman. With Tubman's portrait perched above her writing desk, Gunn pens poems that migrate from South to North, from elegy to prayer, from borrowed shame to self-acceptance. Writing with frankness and honesty, Gunn finds no thought, no memory, too private: a father's verbal blow, a tense visit to a gynecologist's table, the longing to be "erased/by a taxi at 50 miles an hour," and grief at the loss of two former lovers, decades apart. Death is familiar here, yet we find softness, grace, and hope in the culinary lessons learned in warm family kitchens, in the communal laughter of a rehab center's common room, and in the rewards and pleasures of the fat erotic. With poems as malleable as the skin that "misplaced one hundred nine pounds" and filledit again, Gunn proves that, for the Black body, memory often presentsthe heaviest weight. Things I Didn't Do with This Body is a reminder that "carried in the body is the future, the present, and the past." The most capable thing a body can do is remember and bear it and live.

Table of Contents:
I.Father at Table Highway Shells My Father Speaks All Things 'A Long Ways From Home' To Kati Who Doesn't Remember Monarch Girl After Surgery The Last Day / Romania 1986 Look II. Araminta 39 Objects at the Smithsonian Mystic Coda: Refuge III. Go North Notes on a Dream of Dying Ordinary Sugar Hypersisters Repair Work Admissions Collect IV. The Name For Chronic Is It OK Every Letter Every Word Every Page Bad Romance Good Romance Level V. Wake It's like We— Return Tyrant Never Now What You Meant Kaleidoscope VI. Baker Shalimar Morning at Crash Boat Beach Poetic Exercise in the Service of Love Patience Household Stormwatching in Campania Happy and Well Elegy Prayer Things I Didn't Do With This Body & Things I Did Like This

About the Author :
Amanda Gunngrew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as a PhD candidate in English at Harvard where she studies poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Her recent work appears inPoetry,Los Angeles Review of Books QuarterlyJournal, andNarrative Magazine.

Review :
"These assured poems do not read like a debut, as the collection expertly gathers ideas, objects, and affects of one body to converge histories and agonies, just as [Harriet] Tubman leads a group at Combahee 'moving as one black body against the wind.'"—Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation "By dedication, love, and craft. Amanda Gunn places her poetry in conversation with the farming and culinary skills of her forebears: women who cultivated land, survival, strength, and family bonds."—Poetry Unbound "Flesh, kin, refuge."—Ms. Magazine "Here is another deeply intimate collection of poems, this one a debut from Amanda Gunn. Broken into six parts, one for each of the senses, the voices and forms change drastically from page to page. These poems feel very much in the body, the body of Gunn and the body of the reader, all at once. They also explore and interrogate the history of race in America."—Book Riot "Gunn’s formal decisions enable a reader to feel and think with and through her…While embodiment is a through-line, her poems explore (and interweave) subjects that include race, gender, sexuality, history, nationhood, family, illness, cognition, pleasure, and shame. Gunn’s is a poetics both carefully studied and wildly intuitive, a language of both pyrotechnics and searing flame."—Dora Malech"Meditating on kitchens and perfume, grief and romance novels, and family and memory, I found Gunn’s debut collection luminous."—Book Riot "Things I Didn’t Do with This Body is the kind of book that so deftly dazzles at the level of language, one might miss the devastating current that pumps through its thumping heart. Plumbing the depths of both personal ancestry and the larger legacy of Black suffering and resilience, Gunn reveals—and revels in—the impossibility of interiority outside of history, history outside the slow accretion of distinct individual experiences. . . . Things I Didn’t Do with This Body interrogates the self not to exalt its unique suffering, but to stake out solid ground on a trembling planet."—Rain Taxi "Things I Didn’t Do with this Body tackles serious subjects: race, sexuality, gender, aesthetics, societal and personal depictions and interpretations of the body, and any number of other Big Themes; Gunn handles this repertoire with skill, verve, intelligence and wry humor. And yet what I love most about this collection is the granular details of her memories and descriptions."—David Starkey, California Review of Books