Mouths

Author: Claire Marie Stancek

Publisher: Noemi Press (2017)

The poems in Mouths attempt the impossible task of speaking outside human language and after the end of human life. That they always already fail to do so is thematized in chafing refrains, syntactic disjunctions, and the accusatory second person pronoun, which addresses at once the reader and the poetry's own uncomfortable materiality. Mouths is a manifestation of apocalyptic lyric: experimental, eco-critical, and feminist, its varied forms span human, animal, and insect in ever-shifting relationships of speech, song, eros, and consumption. Mouths addresses the inextricability of love and violence in the communities—living and non- living, past and present—that make up our world.