A rebuttal to Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Every Form of Ruin posits the Erinyes’ fury as righteous, understanding Clytemnestra’s rageful response to loss, and refusing Iphigenia’s relegation to a footnoted sacrifice. A fierce and darkly funny examination of anger, these lyrical poems push back against silencing by playing witness to a world where the experiences of women, nonbinary, and femme-identifying people are too often ignored, their responses dismissed as hysterical. These poems are also investigations into the loneliness of midlife; the search for one’s own self when that self has given its life to service. Every Form of Ruin counters our culture’s erasure of women and resists the categorizations of maiden, mother, crone by blurring those distinctions through the creation of voices that are moved by rage and resistance.

BLACK THUMB

The dogwood was threatening

to swallow the back garden’s light,

so I borrowed a chainsaw and gas.

Its last berries a memory of red, the fruit

bitter, tiny angry mangos in the mouth

of its killer. Nights my son chooses his father

to read him into silence, I practice not loving

anything. Less like learning than remembering.

As a child, I studied how to be a child.

I was given a doll to care for

but could never remember its name.

I left her face down everywhere.