Embouchure
poems
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- $13.900
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- $13.900
Descripción editorial
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.
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Phillips (Empty Clip) dissects in her bracing latest the often-bewildering needs, desires, and betrayals of the body with funny and forthright emotional honesty. She assiduously reconstructs the experience of realizing she was queer in adulthood, both the confusion and the joy of knowing something is missing and then discovering what it is. "I admit I searched how to fuck a woman on the internet—/ because my truth came late as my last period," she writes. Phillips has a unique talent for capturing the indignities of adolescence—the awkwardness of sex education, for example, but also becoming a woman and being expected to conform to new and confusing standards of behavior. In "They Called Me Unladylike," she recalls facing derision for being a tomboy, "a presexual soft butch/ Medusa," and unlearning the resulting shame and self-loathing in adulthood through erotic attention: "my belt's as soft/ as a rose petal and I let her tie me up with it/ so I can't stop her from telling me how/ beautiful, how strong, my body is with the whispers/ of her hands." This poignant and intimate account of discovery hums with pitch-perfect humor and triumphs that hit hard.
