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A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery gives voice to abused children, murdered women, research animals, war veterans, and even metronomes and lampshades. In poems inspired by Ovid, Tina Carlson explores the roots of voicelessness and journeys into metamorphosis, granting speech to those ignored or victimized and thereby allowing them to provide witness to their own lives.
Tina Carlson is also the author of Ground, Wind, This Body: Poems (UNM Press).
"Tina Carlson's images are always palpable, surprising, their resonance almost too powerful for the page. What she does with those images, how she shapes and where she takes them, is an experience her readers won't forget. I am still catching my breath."--Margaret Randall, author of Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises
"Here lies a beauty great enough to capture and heal an aching heart, elegiac enough to canonize the lost. These poems cut a path lit by the ancestral flint of Carlson's scalpel. Stepping out into the light after the dark theater of these poems, one perceives more readily a world stripped of its skin, fed by their true seeing, their lazar gaze, and Carlson's own crooked smile, these the touchstones of her artistic reliquary."--Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium
"In A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, vulnerable myths and porous pasts are 'blown open.' These poems unhinge for the reader a kind of nourishment. 'We were once specks of light,' Carlson writes, as she moves us toward illumination."--Lauren Camp, author of Took House
"These are the poems, poet Tina Carlson the guide we need at this crucial time in the inferno of our own making."--Carole Simmons Oles, author of A Selected History of Her Heart: Poems
Backyard of Her Alphabets
Ghost Town on Iris Avenue
A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery
My Mother as Moon
Cigarette Smoke and a Blue Impala
Gran Via
Agoraphobia
My Father Comes Home from War with Guns
My Father Prayed
Mud Babies
The Embassy of Silence
At the Rest Stop, Fully Gloved, She Calls Me Mommy
You Will Dream that Great Aunt Dolor Loves Your Wild Hair
Dark Dowry
How holy the cloth sewn sidewise
Sheltering in Place for Beginners
Coat-Grave, Nation of Moths
ALMA
Anatomy of Silence
Fin Feather Bark and Skin
Day after America
Metronome and Daruma Doll
As Numbers of Dead Rise, Moths Fill the Room
Lampshade and Floor Mat
Turn the Ship Around
Saint Ursula
Heaven
Snow Queen
The Little Robber Girl
Monster
Open Your Mouth
Why did you kill your wife, mr XYZ?
Thirteen Children Rescued from Their Parents Testify
Ice Matron
West Side Murders, Seven Years Later
How She Becomes a Fountain
Every Bird in My Blood Has a Name
Flo and the Frozen Girl
Guest Place in the Shadow
There I Stood, in All My Forms
Until I Could No Longer Fly and So Became a Map: Pegasus
From the Island of Pomegranates
Pandora on the Mother Road
Atlas
There I stood begging at the door of my death
I Fled the Dry Lips of Men
Dermoid
Dear Human,
The Flying Boy
Wearing His Father's Dog Tags
Feathers Appear on Branches as Flame
And When He Thought He Had Found Me
In the Tree Museum
The Painter
Martia
Avalanche
Machu Picchu
Notes
Acknowledgements
Ghost Town on Iris Avenue
A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery
My Mother as Moon
Cigarette Smoke and a Blue Impala
Gran Via
Agoraphobia
My Father Comes Home from War with Guns
My Father Prayed
Mud Babies
The Embassy of Silence
At the Rest Stop, Fully Gloved, She Calls Me Mommy
You Will Dream that Great Aunt Dolor Loves Your Wild Hair
Dark Dowry
How holy the cloth sewn sidewise
Sheltering in Place for Beginners
Coat-Grave, Nation of Moths
ALMA
Anatomy of Silence
Fin Feather Bark and Skin
Day after America
Metronome and Daruma Doll
As Numbers of Dead Rise, Moths Fill the Room
Lampshade and Floor Mat
Turn the Ship Around
Saint Ursula
Heaven
Snow Queen
The Little Robber Girl
Monster
Open Your Mouth
Why did you kill your wife, mr XYZ?
Thirteen Children Rescued from Their Parents Testify
Ice Matron
West Side Murders, Seven Years Later
How She Becomes a Fountain
Every Bird in My Blood Has a Name
Flo and the Frozen Girl
Guest Place in the Shadow
There I Stood, in All My Forms
Until I Could No Longer Fly and So Became a Map: Pegasus
From the Island of Pomegranates
Pandora on the Mother Road
Atlas
There I stood begging at the door of my death
I Fled the Dry Lips of Men
Dermoid
Dear Human,
The Flying Boy
Wearing His Father's Dog Tags
Feathers Appear on Branches as Flame
And When He Thought He Had Found Me
In the Tree Museum
The Painter
Martia
Avalanche
Machu Picchu
Notes
Acknowledgements
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