Starred review from January 18, 2021
The glittering, energetic debut from greathouse seeks to honor and give voices to all bodies: “Before I could accept this body’s fractures, I had to unlearn lame as the first breath of lament,” she writes. Using images and language with surgical precision, greathouse focuses her energy on the body as the site of a “litany of ordinary violences,” a place where scars become stars, where there is power and fear. Here, the body is a space of pain and death (she observes herself as “the first dead son my mother does not bury”), but also birth, beauty, and transformation. For the speaker, the journey from one gender into another is not a form of addition, but a form of subtraction: “Woman/ by inverse proportion. Last light/ passing through the eclipse of a closing eye.” “I admit, I love most what can be removed from me,” greathouse writes. It is the persistence and desire for survival in these poems that makes this collection unflinching in its vulnerability and its power.