Tongue

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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." Tongue is a story as harrowing and magic

Reviews

Rachel Contreni Flynn, the winner of this year's Benjamin Saltman Award, honors us with the grace of her language, her strength of purpose as a poet, and the uncluttered emotional honesty of her work. These poems chronicle the stark contrasts that mark the lives of two sisters. A quirky adolescence and early adulthood is thrust upon one while the other's life is measured out in slow ounces. I was captured by this passionate and loving recounting of tragic years and dislocations. --Eloise Klein Healy, Final Judge, 2009 Benjamin Saltman Prize

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. --Chad Sweeney

Author Bio

Rachel Contreni Flynn was born in Paris in 1969 and raised in a small farming town in Indiana. She got her BA from Indiana University in Bloomington, where she majored in journalism and history. She received her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2001. Her first book, Ice, Mouth, Song, was selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2003 winner of the Dorset Prize. She has recorded her work for the Bloomington/Normal Public Radio station, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was featured as The Spoon River Review's Illinois Poet in 2005. She also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship. Flynn works at Fortune Brands, Inc., a Fortune 500 consumer products company. She teaches poetry courses and workshops occasionally, and lives in Mundelein, Illinois with her husband, Patrick, and their children, Grace and Noah.