The Hideous Hidden
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the winner of the Griffin Prize, a richly lyrical collection of poems exploring the body’s minutiae
In her first full-length collection published in the United States, Sylvia Legris probes and peels, carves and cleaves, amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human and animal anatomy.
Starting with the Greek writings of Hippocrates and the Latin language of medicine, and drawing from Leonardo da Vinci’s Anatomical Manuscripts, the dermatologist Robert Willan’s On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Legris infuses each poem with unique rhythms that roll off the tongue. The Hideous Hidden boldly celebrates anatomy’s wonders: “Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals. / Confess the gallbladder, / the glandular wallflowers, / the objectionable oblong spleen.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her first collection to be published in the U.S., Canadian poet Legris, whose collection Nerve Squall won the 2006 Griffin Prize, sings an "ode to the duodenum," as well as to the kidneys, the spleen, and other "fleshes." "Sweetly/ the plaintive polypeptides sing" in these short, sound-driven, playful poems. Anatomical and medical language, cold and clinical in other contexts, becomes sensuous musical terrain; the sonic atmosphere Legris creates is as thick and slippery as the innards she describes. Quite literally visceral in both subject matter and impact the poems are heavily researched, drawing on medical texts from the classical period, through the Renaissance, and into 18th- and 19th-century medical texts. The bodies, both sick and well, that Legris renders so vividly bear the trace of obsolete medical ideas, where one finds "the ferrous pulse of abandoned anatomies." But the most important influence throughout the book turns out to be Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Whereas Baudelaire's iconic text rendered the modern city in corporeal terms, Legris performs the inverse, making the human body into a vast terrain. Pleasurably unsettling or unsettlingly pleasurable, readers traversing the "Mangrove glands" of Legris's "cold and gluey metropolis" should steel themselves for "A sea-laced epidermal./ A pore map of blisters./ An integumentary ocean floor of unnavigable sores."
