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The Body's Alphabet
Book of poetry, with the family as one of its main themes.
- GenresPoetry
102 pages, Paperback
Published July 25, 2016
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30 people want to read
About the author
Ann Tweedy
6 books22 followersAnn Tweedy’s first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in August 2016 and received a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry in 2017. It was also selected as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Additionally, she has published three chapbooks, the most recent of which, A Registry of Survival, was published by Last Word Press in December 2020. Her other two chapbooks include: Beleaguered Oases (2nd ed. Seven Kitchens Press 2020) and White Out (Green Fuse Press 2013). Her poetry has appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Rattle, damselfly press, Lavender Review, literary mama, Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, and elsewhere. Ann holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Hamline University. Originally from Southeastern Massachusetts, she has lived in many places on the West Coast and in the Midwest and now makes her home on the eastern edge of South Dakota. In addition to writing poetry and essays, she is also a law professor who specializes in law relating to Native American Tribes.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 10, 2017
A poet friend in California asked me if I knew Ann Tweedy and her work because she lives in Seattle. When I did not she quickly introduced me to her and recommended her book, The Body's Alphabet. When I was at AWP17 I met Ann, bought her book, and read it yesterday. What a wonderful book of poetry.
She starts off with poems about family, in particular her relationship with her mother who has an unnamed mental illness. The imagery is alive and I was drawn in immediately, in the first poem, "eggshells," she writes, "with a hallway carpet of scattered/newspaper, with junkmail piles on the ironing/board, the kitchen table, the counter,/with holes in the rotting floor/that my mother dug deeper/when she got bored". I see my own cluttered earth planes, feel the tension of the mother immediately and her angst in the continuing stanza, "i tread through/the world mindful that upsets/follow unguarded movement."
Other relationships cover her son, she describes birth and breast feeding with a dive into the body that continues through the book, she writes of a husband, and female lovers. In her bio it says she is a lawyer who represents Indian tribes. Her knowledge and identification with birds is also evident in many of her striking bird poems that capture the idiosyncrasies of a variety of species: eagle, crane, hummingbirds, ducks, stellar jays, grackle, etc.
This book is well put together and spans the territory of a wounded heart. In the poem "dirt under the fingernails" she writes, "the women who loved me/occupy my past. you can take/a tourist train to visit/the fights and the tears,/the put-downs and the barren/silences, replayed over and over/because suffering,/like moxie, makes you stronger,/because there's no point is there/in nostalgia, because nothing/can be gained by chasing after/yesterday, so you may as well slather/the beauty and the warmth, the orgasm/on the boulder in the middle of the river,/with the black paint of despair."
She has blurbs from two of my favorite poets: D.A. Powell and Carol Guess, and a third from Katrina Vandenberg. I highly recommend reading "The Body's Alphabet."
She starts off with poems about family, in particular her relationship with her mother who has an unnamed mental illness. The imagery is alive and I was drawn in immediately, in the first poem, "eggshells," she writes, "with a hallway carpet of scattered/newspaper, with junkmail piles on the ironing/board, the kitchen table, the counter,/with holes in the rotting floor/that my mother dug deeper/when she got bored". I see my own cluttered earth planes, feel the tension of the mother immediately and her angst in the continuing stanza, "i tread through/the world mindful that upsets/follow unguarded movement."
Other relationships cover her son, she describes birth and breast feeding with a dive into the body that continues through the book, she writes of a husband, and female lovers. In her bio it says she is a lawyer who represents Indian tribes. Her knowledge and identification with birds is also evident in many of her striking bird poems that capture the idiosyncrasies of a variety of species: eagle, crane, hummingbirds, ducks, stellar jays, grackle, etc.
This book is well put together and spans the territory of a wounded heart. In the poem "dirt under the fingernails" she writes, "the women who loved me/occupy my past. you can take/a tourist train to visit/the fights and the tears,/the put-downs and the barren/silences, replayed over and over/because suffering,/like moxie, makes you stronger,/because there's no point is there/in nostalgia, because nothing/can be gained by chasing after/yesterday, so you may as well slather/the beauty and the warmth, the orgasm/on the boulder in the middle of the river,/with the black paint of despair."
She has blurbs from two of my favorite poets: D.A. Powell and Carol Guess, and a third from Katrina Vandenberg. I highly recommend reading "The Body's Alphabet."
March 19, 2022
"If you could live your life over, you'd make the same mistakes/they'd just be more frustrating"
"Somewhere outside a daughter's jurisdiction...."
"Home is the structure you build/when nowhere else will have you"
There are lines here that will stay with me quite a while.
"Somewhere outside a daughter's jurisdiction...."
"Home is the structure you build/when nowhere else will have you"
There are lines here that will stay with me quite a while.
December 27, 2017
When I first heard Ann Tweedy read, in October 2016 in Duvall, Washington, I felt an immediate kinship. So brave, fearless, and lyrical. Every poem was a cipher, a key to an underlying story.
Reading the poems in quiet, I felt that connection deepen. I spent the next winter and spring reading them, as morning meditations, one by one.
What struck me most was the surgical elegance with which the poet documents and disentangles the madness and dis-ease of things: her childhood home; the tenderness of her encounter with a dying baby bird; the urgent double life of an emerging bisexual woman. Even the most sorrowful and chilling poems have hope in them.
Here’s one of my favorites.
The Common Grackle
A fluffy grey chick stranded below high
acidic cedar shrubs. We near. It tries
to fly. And flies—a foot or two. The wings
reveal—in stretching-pink inside each edge.
A leg in landing crumples. What is there
but hope? I ask what you—my out-of-town
friend—think about our taking it to a
rehab center. I hold it in a hand—
soft, bony, it makes small efforts to get
away. My fingers tighten. Later, we
are told they put it down. The fractures too
severe, damaged muscle. Dehydration.
A life that I'd once held. I'd picked it up
and seen its parent swoop. Nothing but hope.
—Ann Tweedy, The Body’s Alphabet
Reading the poems in quiet, I felt that connection deepen. I spent the next winter and spring reading them, as morning meditations, one by one.
What struck me most was the surgical elegance with which the poet documents and disentangles the madness and dis-ease of things: her childhood home; the tenderness of her encounter with a dying baby bird; the urgent double life of an emerging bisexual woman. Even the most sorrowful and chilling poems have hope in them.
Here’s one of my favorites.
The Common Grackle
A fluffy grey chick stranded below high
acidic cedar shrubs. We near. It tries
to fly. And flies—a foot or two. The wings
reveal—in stretching-pink inside each edge.
A leg in landing crumples. What is there
but hope? I ask what you—my out-of-town
friend—think about our taking it to a
rehab center. I hold it in a hand—
soft, bony, it makes small efforts to get
away. My fingers tighten. Later, we
are told they put it down. The fractures too
severe, damaged muscle. Dehydration.
A life that I'd once held. I'd picked it up
and seen its parent swoop. Nothing but hope.
—Ann Tweedy, The Body’s Alphabet
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews