Even Shorn

by Isabel Duarte-Gray

Overview

Even Shorn takes its title from the Song of Solomon and that Book’s equation of pastoral feminine beauty with the plenty of harvest. Isabel Duarte-Gray argues that material bounty no longer exists in the rural spaces where she was raised. Duarte-Gray’s poetry mines local orature, family history, and folklore for the music of Western Kentucky, creating the sparse line breaks and the harsh syntax of the present. The poems describe quilt patterns with sinister shapes: “a snake’s tongue is a trigger finger/Man’s tongue pleases no one.” Animals proliferate: “One cat became five/five became nine. /Then a flood and ebb/as each moon brought its tide/below the trailer floor…” A grandfather plays drunk, solitary Russian Roulette. A cousin lives in a closet. Duarte’s poetry is shocking, whip smart, and truly unique.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946448750
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	04/01/2022
Series:	The Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Isabel Duarte-Gray was born in Oakland, California and raised in a trailer in Kuttawa, Kentucky. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, where she studies Latinx Literature, Poetry, and Ecocriticism. She received her B.A. in English and Russian from Amherst College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Colorado Review, Bat City Review, The South Carolina Review, and December magazine, among others.

Read an Excerpt

Even Shorn


time I lost my teeth I didn’t think to mourn them
though the ache swung my jawbone
far across the ripplegrass

the Cadiz dentist give me
such a jar of new mouth as could
reincarnate mine

I’d as soon shake my ashes
loose on the cattail slough
the way you wait a death that’s quick


Complaint


I am weary with my groaning
all the night I make my bed to swim
the minnows swallowed live to cure a cough
plodding still I tell of gravity
the curl of carp in shallow rivers sniffing
for the temperature of life
what are bones that they can feel
be vexed for stillness
as the wind prepares
to choose the word most carefully
for rain the silty dread
when rocks will slither
down the mountain in a saffron
scarf the rags of hillsides pool
into a pillow for my dreaming there is comfort
to be taken when two dreads are parted
should I drown my couch in tears

Table of Contents

I

Nightjar 3

Cutter Quilt 5

[I said your daddy's gone] 7

Chamber 9

Complaint 10

Even Shorn 11

Like Hell You Are 12

A Portion for Foxes 14

Garden 16

The Sawmill 17

II

Tennessee Valley Authority 21

Blue Hole 22

Drunkard's Path 23

Old Nag 24

The Whore of Dycusburg 26

Cast Iron 28

Washline 30

Penitent 31

We Do Not Sing 32

Pin Oak 33

III

[the new man bragged] 37

The Shrew Ash 38

Like as of Fire 39

Odd Fellow's Cross 41

Fallen Bridge 43

Echo 44

Father 46

Topping the Flower 47

Hillis Rednour Meets a Leviathan 49

IV

Eclogue 53

His Left Foot 54

Solomon's Seal 55

Third Story Fall 56

[Back when people died it was clean] 57

Lot's Wife 59

Riddle 61

V

Hognose Snake 65

The Shrike Took His Name for Crying 66

Familiars 67

To Field Dress a Doe 69

[his name] 71

Black Swallowtail 72

Great Blue Heron 73

Chicken Hawk 74

Box Turtle 76

Notes 79

Acknowledgments 81

Editorial Reviews

New England Book Awards Finalist in Poetry
Boston Globe, “The Best Books of 2021”
The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry: May 2021”



"An impressive debut that reverberates with its anchoring sense of place."
—“Must-Read Poetry: May 2021,” The Millions

"[A] spirited, stimulating advancement of Southern literary traditions."
—Poetry Foundation, online

"Haunting is what this debut collection is and does: Isabel Duarte-Gray tracks family history and violent lineages across Western Kentucky’s small towns. Starting from scant archival traces — quilt patterns, bloodied landscapes, the finest vintages in local gossip — Duarte-Gray resurrects ghostly testimonies, crafted out of rural dialects and a free-verse line filed to a brilliant sharpness."
— Christopher Spaide, The Boston Globe

"Duarte-Gray invites us as readers into the 'secret language' of her lyric with hunger and leaf and tongue and wound. It’s stunning work, and Duarte-Gray’s remarkable debut is one of wholly unique and unforgettable lyricism."
—Colorado Review, online

"What reader would not be tempted to open the slender volume and risk getting bitten, just to see what’s inside? The first poem, Night Jar, begins with a dress the color of a red dairy barn. Lightning bugs hang low like an angel stopped to think a spell. In the darkening, the red gets lost, and the poem ends, no color left at all. Driskill, Kentucky are the last words on the page, and when asked about the place, the poet answers with, 'Is it real?' The same question can be repeated throughout the book, as the people and places in the poems come from family stories, Southern folklore, and the history of Western Kentucky. Locales in the region — places perhaps never mentioned in poetry or celebrated in history — include Kentucky’s Lyon County, Grand Rivers, Murray, Dycusburg, Eddyville, Paducah, and Dresden, Tennessee."
—"Isabel Duarte-Gray’s first book of poems features voices of Western Kentucky" by Constance Alexander, KY Forward

“Isabel Duarte-Gray’s book is like no other—a text that ‘thinks the spell,’ cut-off tales, callings, sudden leaps in lines ‘split in two,’ perhaps like this collection itself, splicing carefully through the belly, the heart and the sternum—animals, wives and husbands. You choose. The more you read, the more you scrape and peel through the night fallen—‘sniffing for the temperatures of life.’ Isabel Duarte-Gray’s grasp of deep and perhaps forbidden vernaculars, cultural edges and crossings is profound. The place is underground, underwater, under the crackling structures and somewhere inside abandoned, formless barns in a far-off crimson. An immediate prize-winner. A bold, brave, rare, genius, meticulous, deeper and deeper at work.”

— Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus

“The creeks the tears the patriarchy. The Osage orange the intelligible terror. The tiny towns. The no towns at all. The dragonflies the bones the lilies. The difficult ongoing work of recovery. The marriages the handsewn linens the burials. The excess. The shortage. The fear, and the ways to get past that fear. The lists. The anecdotes. The scenes set and dismantled. The herbals the escapees the strings .The listening. That's what you'll find, and it's far from all you'll find, in this strong first collection, a song of songs, an evidence of evidence, a manifestation from places some of us know and many more of us should hear. I give thanks for it.”

—Stephanie Burt, author of Advice from the Lights and The Poet is You

From the Publisher