Veil and Burn

by Laurie Clements Lambeth

Concerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, Veil and Burn illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, become it, and in the transformation, to understand the suffering body. In poems about animals, artifacts, and monsters, Lambeth displays a fascination for all bodies while exploring their pain, common fate, alienation, and abilities. Hovering between poem and prose fragment, between the self and fellow creatures, Laurie Clements Lambeth celebrates physical sensation, imbuing it with lyric shape, however broken, however imprisoned the shape may be.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

and then it was my turn to look after
the dog. A blue merle on the barn floor,
one of those cattle herding dogs
from another ranch, come to our farm
to die. We don’t want you; this is not
heaven, I told the dog. Go back home.
She slowly rolled sideways to show her pink
belly, a bright underside slit up
the center, ravaged by maggots. Pearls,
the gaudy kind, adorning the living.

[Emma Kolditz Jensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for my master thesis on desexualisation of the disabled body.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I find most impressive with this book is the way that the metaphors in this book speak to multiple topics. Is the dance that appears in "Cutting Distance" only about her courtship with Ian? Or could it also be a metaphor for the way illness comes into the body. The book leaves questions like this open. And it is layering like this that complicates the poet's sickness. And makes its onset more true to me and more tragic.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've done a lengthy review of this in Wordgathering, but in short, it is an amazingly self-assured first book of poetry. It avoids all of the standard cliches about disability. It is unsentimental and seeks no sympathy. Instead, by integrating poems with prose fragments, it documents the gradual unraveling of the narrators body in a senuous and multi-nuanced fashion text. It is a testament to the fact that stability is an illusion and nothing exists but change.