Tongue [Paperback]

In this haunting, intense, and lyrical new collection of poems by Rachel Contreni Flynn, we meet two sisters growing up in farmland America until they are separated by the older girl’s illness. The younger girl travels to the Maine coast where the radio reports “the discovery of a human tongue on the beach.”Tongueis a story as harrowing and magical as any Old World fairy tale, told in a voice that is at once frank and gentle. Flynn has crafted a book full of “wilderness, mystery, magic,” as her poems confront time and again the myths and memories of childhood and ask us to name what nourishes, changes, sustains, and saves us. Sensuous, inventive and startling images cohere into narrative: here, anger is a piano, God is a Matchbox car, loyalty is a wild pig. At its essence,Tongueis about the unending complexity and sheer stubbornness of love: “so difficult, so generous, so fabulous.”

Rachel Contreni Flynn’s intimate collection examines exile from the self, the body, and from family and society as it exacts the dangerous and necessary work of remembering. In Tongue, the narrative lens shifts breathtakingly between trauma, wonder, insight and irony, each laboring in concert to “force the story to its rightful unfolding.” Flynn demonstrates that identity is shaped by, and the self owes its very survival to, that unfolding where beauty is crafted from toxin, music from intractable anger—and with the tongue (as both language and tough muscle), one must “feast on solitude” in order to sing out bravely the root-note of grace. These wise, tender poems urge us to “love this world, though it is flawed/. . .love it entirely, or be lost” all the while recognizing that such an undertaking is no less than the daily rescue of one’s own life from exile. &l3œ