i built a boat with all the towels in your closet

by Leia Penina Wilson

Leia Penina Wilson’s i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) is at once a love ballad and a warning. These poems are—at their simplest—about relationships, sex, love, creatures, different kinds (and degrees) of violence, and—at their most complex—about the limits of the imagination, of language, and about the power the imagination has over the body. These poems confront the shifty line between human and animal, and urge the at what cost the body. Wilson’s animal-human doesn’t intend to answer that question; instead, she lunges towards it and tears it up and begins again, and again, and again.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2014

Reviews

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book while pacing in my apartment slowly. It took me 3862 steps and 3 gin and tonics to read this book. After reading this book many people told me that my hair looks cute. A man in the grocery store also lauded my selection of bosc pears. They're better than apples, aren't they? he said. I nodded. I feel certain this connection was made because of this book.

Often during the reading of this book, I bent down to boop noses with my cat. This experience seems important.

I feel confident that the reading of this book will shape and color my coming days in unforeseen ways. I am thinking about my body and your body and the animal body and gender and food and agency and violence and change and location, because of this book.

[Lorinda Toledo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leia Penina Wilson's poetry is dark, lyric, and gorgeous. In this collection, she takes the reader on a treacherous and irresistible exploration of the search for self, at the same time tackling assumptions about love, about the body, and about the limits of prescribed ways of being in the world. With her signature wit and ferocity, Wilson crafts a tender narrative that seeks an authentic self, on one's own terms, and wonders at whether such a self can be maintained in connection to another. This is a book to keep by your bedside and read over and over as you marvel at the ways Wilson pushes the limits of language.

[john compton · Rating 5 out of 5]

superb. addictive. fascinating. explosive. so many great poems.