A lyrically and formally innovative exploration of desire and its cost

DEED, the follow-up to torrin a. greathouse's 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winning debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, survival, myth, etymology, and musical touchstones from Bruce Springsteen to Against Me!, this new book both subverts and pays homage to the poetic canon, examining an artistic lineage that doesn't always love trans or disabled people back. Written in a broad range of received and invented forms--from caudate sonnets and the sestina, to acrostics and the burning haibun--DEED indicts violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power which disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, as well as the potentially vicarious manner in which audiences consume art. This collection is a poetic triptych centered on the question of how, in spite of all these complications, to write an honest poem about desire. At its core, DEED is a reminder of how tenderness can be made a shield, a weapon, or a kind of faith, depending on the mouth that holds it.

[sample text]

from Etymythology

I'm clocked by etymology,

by the way even stilettos take their name
from a knife. The way a knife, well-honed,
can strip anything to the bone. Bear

with me, sometimes even the myths grow
blurry in the distance. The root of Artemis,
goddess of the hunt, is still unknown,

but likely comes from artamos--butcher.
Let's call this a kind of etymythology,
post hoc history; let's call Artemis

the root. For her wild heart. Her failed
femininity. Goddess of gender-fucked
girls. Crooked prayer. The word worship

is shaped from two shards--meaning worth
& its giving. A mouth gives faith shape
like clay. I mean that to pray is to god

a God. To be butch & butcher
the myth of a son, was to make
a goddess of myself.

A Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Poetry

A CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Poetry

Some girls are not made, torrin a. greathouse writes, but spring from the dirt. Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound--selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry--challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates buckteeth & ulcer. She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.

These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse's poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. I'm still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.

Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse--elegant, vicious, a one-girl armageddon draped in crushed velvet--teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.

A lyrically and formally innovative exploration of desire and its cost

DEED, the follow-up to torrin a. greathouse's 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winning debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, survival, myth, etymology, and musical touchstones from Bruce Springsteen to Against Me!, this new book both subverts and pays homage to the poetic canon, examining an artistic lineage that doesn't always love trans or disabled people back. Written in a broad range of received and invented forms--from caudate sonnets and the sestina, to acrostics and the burning haibun--DEED indicts violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power which disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, as well as the potentially vicarious manner in which audiences consume art. This collection is a poetic triptych centered on the question of how, in spite of all these complications, to write an honest poem about desire. At its core, DEED is a reminder of how tenderness can be made a shield, a weapon, or a kind of faith, depending on the mouth that holds it.

[sample text]

from Etymythology

I'm clocked by etymology,

by the way even stilettos take their name
from a knife. The way a knife, well-honed,
can strip anything to the bone. Bear

with me, sometimes even the myths grow
blurry in the distance. The root of Artemis,
goddess of the hunt, is still unknown,

but likely comes from artamos--butcher.
Let's call this a kind of etymythology,
post hoc history; let's call Artemis

the root. For her wild heart. Her failed
femininity. Goddess of gender-fucked
girls. Crooked prayer. The word worship

is shaped from two shards--meaning worth
& its giving. A mouth gives faith shape
like clay. I mean that to pray is to god

a God. To be butch & butcher
the myth of a son, was to make
a goddess of myself.