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Embouchure: Poems
An embouchure is the way in which a wind musician applies their mouth to an instrument's mouthpiece, and Embouchure, Emilia Phillips's fourth poetry collection, sets its mouth, ready to play. Trumpeting a picaresque coming out story, the poems are at turns self-deprecatory and revelatory, exploring sexual fluidity and non-monosexuality. From the speaker's adolescent crushes to her closeted 20s to her eventual acceptance of queerness, her disarming joy—even at her own mistakes—is cut with challenges to toxic masculinity and reckonings with anticipatory anxiety. The tomboy the speaker once was is transfigured into “a presexual soft butch / Medusa” with a “beautiful, beautiful / body that didn't know yet // how to contain itself.” Elsewhere, the speaker evades a Dickinsonian personification of Death, who seems more like an inescapable ex-boyfriend than a welcome bridegroom. Phillips's mock-confessionalism is as brassy as it is vulnerable.
- GenresPoetry
111 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 16, 2021
46 people want to read
About the author
Emilia Phillips
10 books15 followersEmilia Phillips is the author of a previous collection, Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013), and three chapbooks, most recently Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, 2015). She's received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry and lyric essays have appeared in Agni, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary College of New Jersey and the 32 Poems interviews editor.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 4, 2023
When I turned twelve, I started a twelve year tradition of spending summers with my grandmother.
This was my father's mother, this grandmother, and she spoke boldly of the body, of sex, sexual feelings, and a few other topics that I didn't know much about: incest, molestation, and sexual assault.
Though my grandmother and her sister were the small town products of the 1920s, my grandmother had an alarming repertoire of tales of sexual misconduct. If Grandmother's stories were to be believed, both she and her sister had dodged more than their fair share of wayward fingers, unwanted gropings, and sweaty wrestling matches with cousins, uncles and neighbors. Most disturbing of all was the story of a young woman in their community who was abducted on the same stretch of lonely road my grandmother and my great aunt walked every day. This young woman was never seen again.
After my first summer with my open book of a grandmother, I returned home and tentatively shared some of these stories with my mom. My mother rarely discussed any such topics with me, and I spent most of my childhood looking at her back, as she faced the sink, but after I shared the catalogue of Grandmother's horror stories, my mother surprised me by saying, “She's right. You've got to watch your back.”
I kind of wish that someone else might have wanted to watch my back; I was twelve, after all, but it was the 80s, and apparently that was my job to do alone. I understood quickly, though, why both women had contributed what they had: that autumn it was as though someone had flicked a switch and given the stage direction, “Perverts: Enter, Stage Left.”
I won't go into all of my own tales of the sexual misconduct around me, but it's likely that you've got a few of your own anyway. (A friend of mine just told me, a couple of weeks ago, that she spent the majority of her twenties “hiding behind trees and bushes.” Apparently she was a runner, and though she ran “in the ugliest, baggiest sweat pants” she could find, she could barely run a mile before some jerk-off had made a U-turn and had started to come after her, in his car. She was basically hunted like an animal, almost every time she went out for a casual jog.
Emilia Phillips, the writer of this collection, Embouchure, has some horror stories of her own. As an adult, she's a faculty member at UNC Greensboro, where she teaches both Creative Writing and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Ms. Phillips's poetry is not subtle. She stepped forward with great courage to write about sexual abuse and assault, and not the kind depicted in the movies where the stranger jumps out of the bushes. She writes of the sexual abuse and assault that is so much more common to most of us: being betrayed by our boyfriends, our teachers, our neighbors, our relatives, our friends.
Though there is still the ever-present and charming threat of strangers:
I was followed by
a car for ten minutes and at a traffic
light the passenger leaned
out his window and yelled, I'd love
to pound your cunt to pulp
while my buddy rips your ass
apart
And, of course, the casual misogyny from classmates:
Some boys in my middle school
coughed cottage cheese whenever I wore
a skirt. Which was every day.
Their disgust with the body unlimited
Add to this. . . Ms. Phillips identifies as queer (her words) as an adult, and she only ever went out with boys, in the first place, to please her parents.
This is a difficult read, and an incredibly courageous one. I think that book clubs with a little moxie might want to flex their muscles with a book this provoking.
Other themes explored: adolescence, self-loathing, and love.
In love, I am as effusive as an opened
artery. No, as gravy
on flat china, with nothing, no biscuit or hard-crust
bread, to sop it all up. And when am I not in love?
Ms. Philipps's work may be well on its way to ending up on my bookshelves, next to Dorothy Allison's and Audre Lorde's.
This was my father's mother, this grandmother, and she spoke boldly of the body, of sex, sexual feelings, and a few other topics that I didn't know much about: incest, molestation, and sexual assault.
Though my grandmother and her sister were the small town products of the 1920s, my grandmother had an alarming repertoire of tales of sexual misconduct. If Grandmother's stories were to be believed, both she and her sister had dodged more than their fair share of wayward fingers, unwanted gropings, and sweaty wrestling matches with cousins, uncles and neighbors. Most disturbing of all was the story of a young woman in their community who was abducted on the same stretch of lonely road my grandmother and my great aunt walked every day. This young woman was never seen again.
After my first summer with my open book of a grandmother, I returned home and tentatively shared some of these stories with my mom. My mother rarely discussed any such topics with me, and I spent most of my childhood looking at her back, as she faced the sink, but after I shared the catalogue of Grandmother's horror stories, my mother surprised me by saying, “She's right. You've got to watch your back.”
I kind of wish that someone else might have wanted to watch my back; I was twelve, after all, but it was the 80s, and apparently that was my job to do alone. I understood quickly, though, why both women had contributed what they had: that autumn it was as though someone had flicked a switch and given the stage direction, “Perverts: Enter, Stage Left.”
I won't go into all of my own tales of the sexual misconduct around me, but it's likely that you've got a few of your own anyway. (A friend of mine just told me, a couple of weeks ago, that she spent the majority of her twenties “hiding behind trees and bushes.” Apparently she was a runner, and though she ran “in the ugliest, baggiest sweat pants” she could find, she could barely run a mile before some jerk-off had made a U-turn and had started to come after her, in his car. She was basically hunted like an animal, almost every time she went out for a casual jog.
Emilia Phillips, the writer of this collection, Embouchure, has some horror stories of her own. As an adult, she's a faculty member at UNC Greensboro, where she teaches both Creative Writing and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Ms. Phillips's poetry is not subtle. She stepped forward with great courage to write about sexual abuse and assault, and not the kind depicted in the movies where the stranger jumps out of the bushes. She writes of the sexual abuse and assault that is so much more common to most of us: being betrayed by our boyfriends, our teachers, our neighbors, our relatives, our friends.
Though there is still the ever-present and charming threat of strangers:
I was followed by
a car for ten minutes and at a traffic
light the passenger leaned
out his window and yelled, I'd love
to pound your cunt to pulp
while my buddy rips your ass
apart
And, of course, the casual misogyny from classmates:
Some boys in my middle school
coughed cottage cheese whenever I wore
a skirt. Which was every day.
Their disgust with the body unlimited
Add to this. . . Ms. Phillips identifies as queer (her words) as an adult, and she only ever went out with boys, in the first place, to please her parents.
This is a difficult read, and an incredibly courageous one. I think that book clubs with a little moxie might want to flex their muscles with a book this provoking.
Other themes explored: adolescence, self-loathing, and love.
In love, I am as effusive as an opened
artery. No, as gravy
on flat china, with nothing, no biscuit or hard-crust
bread, to sop it all up. And when am I not in love?
Ms. Philipps's work may be well on its way to ending up on my bookshelves, next to Dorothy Allison's and Audre Lorde's.
September 5, 2021
Nobody does or should care what I think about these poems, but I thought they were kind of eh. Phillips writes sentences, which I like, but her line breaks feel random or at least not arrayed in a way that sets a rhythm I could catch and swing with. I started ignoring the line breaks, which made them short memoirs, and they were fun and moving-- the one about her dog eating crayons went on the wall outside my office, the poem about how her face got cut made me squirm and want to teach between my fingers, and the poems about her learning she was queer made me feel like the people she told, who had known apparently for longer than she did. It was OK, but maybe a collection on the way to another collection that works more fully.
July 31, 2021
4.25 stars
I prefer Phillips' previous collection, Empty Clip, over this one, but there's still a lot to appreciate here. There's a brashness to Phillips' work that feels really fresh. Most of the poems cover similar subjects, so the few that don't feel a bit out of place. Phillips is definitely a must-read poet for me.
I prefer Phillips' previous collection, Empty Clip, over this one, but there's still a lot to appreciate here. There's a brashness to Phillips' work that feels really fresh. Most of the poems cover similar subjects, so the few that don't feel a bit out of place. Phillips is definitely a must-read poet for me.
April 27, 2021
Such a badass book of poems.
May 9, 2021
Terrific poetry book. Imagery! Story!
November 30, 2022
These poems were excellent!
September 7, 2023
A collection of poems about sexuality, survival, violence, identity, and the body.
from To the Young Man Who Always Sat Quietly in the Back of the First Literature Class I Ever Taught, Who Gave Me a Poem Comparing Me to a Commonly Hunted Bird: "Believe me, I already know well / inadequency is a buckshot // hunger I'll never fill. I didn't need / a reminder that I must stand // in a room full of gazes, some of them / male. My body engendered // fowl by this gendered / foul."
from Plaster Cast: "This was long before I learned / to tell someone that I loved them // by saying fuck you when they hurt / me, sharp and clear as a splinter of glass // weeks after I dropped the wine and swept the past / into a pan."
from To the Young Man Who Always Sat Quietly in the Back of the First Literature Class I Ever Taught, Who Gave Me a Poem Comparing Me to a Commonly Hunted Bird: "Believe me, I already know well / inadequency is a buckshot // hunger I'll never fill. I didn't need / a reminder that I must stand // in a room full of gazes, some of them / male. My body engendered // fowl by this gendered / foul."
from Plaster Cast: "This was long before I learned / to tell someone that I loved them // by saying fuck you when they hurt / me, sharp and clear as a splinter of glass // weeks after I dropped the wine and swept the past / into a pan."
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews