The Truth Is, Paperback/Avery M. Guess
Descriere
Poetry. "In THE TRUTH IS Avery M. Guess ensnares her reader in a terrifying drama of intimacy's invasions--incest, abuse, institutionalization, suicide, illness--that the reader, like the speaker, cannot escape. And yet, all the while, here too is the grace and salvation only the natural world offers us; here too is the guardian strength of ginkgo trees, thunderstorms, the Everglades, the ocean, the Miami sun. Here too is a whole woman's body, which, once she discovers she is never separate from the loving silence on which this good earth turns, becomes something so much greater than what she endures. And so do we."--Rebecca Gayle Howell "Perhaps you think you have a sense of what it is to be a survivor. Or perhaps, like me, you are one. But let me tell you: no familiarity with trauma will prepare you for the singular world of Avery M. Guess' book, steeped as it is in a Florida childhood of Spanish moss and sea cucumbers, armadillos and bats, the whole place hurricane-wrecked, reeking of marine debris, the flooded carpet replaced by a bright red shag in which a father creeps across to his daughter's bed at night. Here you have not a story of recovery but the day-by-day blast of fire it takes to choose life, or more accurately, to reclaim a body that's been heisted, so much so that to feel anything a return to the body's animal self is the only thing that works--sometimes by cutting but also by slipping into the skin of an alligator or growing antlers where her mother's nails broke off in her scalp. Reader, I swear to you--no book, not since I first found Sharon Olds or Linda Mc Carriston or Rachel Mc Kibbens--has scorched my heart with such furious beauty."--Nickole Brown "THE TRUTH IS--an astonishingly powerful debut collection by Avery M. Guess--holds the multiple facets of trauma up to the light with a piercing, rainbowed clarity. These are poems that sensitively unfold legacies of childhood sexual abuse and mental illness with fierce candor, while simultaneously p
