Wild Tongue

Author: Rebecca Seiferle

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (2007)

In Seiferle’s fourth book of poems, the tongue is both language and body, and Wild Tongue rages against bits, bridles, and palliatives that attempt to calm or control. It counterbalances divorce and domestic violence with newfound love and cathartic wit. Beautiful and direct, the poems are like cave drawings, inspired by urgency and concern, working into the cracks and contours of truth and wounds. “The human voice on the edge of extinction,” Seiferle writes, “and on that edge, everything wild, unspoken, vital and living, begins to speak out.”