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Thunderhead
Emily Rose Cole
Wisconsin Poetry Series
Ronald Wallace and Sean Bishop, Series Editors
“Fiercely imaginative, these heart-wrenching, lyric narrative poems are haunted by the body as a depository for trauma, the body with cancer, the body with MS, the body cut open and sacrificed, teaching us that grief comes from love while transforming us with exquisite and beautiful language that is simply breathtaking.”
—Judy Jordan
In this striking and nostalgic collection, Emily Rose Cole unearths the fragility and resilience of daughterhood through indelible imagery that evokes new senses of the body: swallowing keys, rain lashing eyelids, unzipping of flesh. Grieving self-portraits of historical and mythological women are woven with stirring recollections of struggling bodies and evocative spells to overcome them. Undulating with memories and magic, illness and death, these poems reveal how a single chance at life and loving can be both too much and not enough.
Her bed,
from this angle, looks like an altar. Isaiah, when you wrote,
The wolf will live with the lamb, what did you mean?
Some days, cancer is the wolf. Some days, the wolf is Mama.
—excerpt from “Still Life with Lines from Isaiah”
Emily Rose Cole is a writer and lyricist from Pennsylvania. She is the author of Love & a Loaded Gun, a chapbook of persona poems from Minerva Rising Press. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Poet Lore, and the Los Angeles Review, among others.
Praise
“To love means opening one’s soul to the possibility of heartbreak. Enthralling all the way through, Thunderhead reads as a testament to passion itself—an invitation to recognize the bond between suffering and intense desire.”
—Barrelhouse
“Gorgeous and devastating. . . . The combination of historical, mythographic, and real-while-invented female figurations offers a compelling and creative approach to bestowing Cole’s never patronizing life-lessons with respect to loss, gender, and disablement. This book is teaching without didactics. . . . Cole’s book as a crip feminist work is evocative not only of Chopin’s nocturnes, but of Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ including its own uniquely shifting transcripts, bold captions, and vivid image descriptions.”
—Diane R. Wiener, Wordgathering
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Larger images
April 2022
LC: 2021041583 PS
80 pp. 7 x 9
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