Wound from the Mouth of a Wound
torrin a. greathouse
Reviewed by Hiba Tahir
WOUND FROM THE MOUTH OF A WOUND BY TORRIN A. GREATHOUSE
torrin a. greathouse’s Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is an indomitable force exploring the intersections of gender, disability, trauma, and survival.
Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, this stunning collection grapples with many themes, including the body and its many facets, but especially the mouth; the duality of beginnings and endings; blood and bloodshed; family and heritage; and the color white.
Often, many themes are invoked at the same time—“begin with the body— itself a kind / of ending,” greathouse writes in the first poem—but the move is never heavy-handed or illogical. On the contrary, it helps to orient the reader amid the often-staggering violence inherent throughout the collection.
While greathouse’s poetry can serve as a masterclass in extended metaphor, her incredible linguistic dexterity shines through best in the sundry forms she uses to convey her message: everything from essay fragments to a sonnet meant to be read in a mirror “written in opposition of Michael Ryan and all other poets, educators, critics, and editors who believe that neither the form of a poem, nor the identities of its author, are relevant to the reading of that work.”
Despite their palpable pain, these poems are ultimately triumphant; she closes the aforementioned mirror poem with the line: “crippled, trans, woman, & still alive.”
In “Ekphrasis on My Rapist’s Wedding Dress,” greathouse writes, “…& isn’t this just like my poems? / Dressing a violence in something pretty & telling it to dance?” Nothing better encapsulates this collection—a truly remarkable study of persistence and resilience in a world that seeks to diminish them.