cover image Rumored Animals

Rumored Animals

Quinn Latimer. Dream Horse (www.dreamhorsepress.com), $17.95 trade paper (116p) ISBN 978-1-935716-13-6

In her debut, Latimer draws on sources from contemporary photography and art—Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman, Donald Judd—to develop a complex engagement with constructions of self and prevailing cultural determinations of the female and feminine. In rich, robust sounds and rhythms, the poet strives to recognize herself within surface and image (“silver mirrors of ice,” “a water pale body miming my own”), attempts to identify with the object of an outside gaze, figured as the looming presence of a brutally defining camera, and a discomfort at the fraught relation between herself as body and represented sign. More often than not, illusory, elusive reflective surfaces prove dangerously isolating (“Blue mirrors/ of lakes linger like glittery apprentices.... In their reflection, I stumble...”) while the poet’s consciousness of being seen and fixed by another is spiked with mistrust: “all borders are defined by/ a body and the water lapping against it./ Whose hands hold this picture?/ Whose eyes?” Negotiating contradictory urges to conceal and reveal identity, Latimer allows a quiet refusal to come fully into view. This is an impressive debut. (Mar.)