distance decay

Via language that ranges from blunt to circuitous, Eisenhower (would with and) orbits the body as subject and object of violence in her third full-length collection. What pervades the text is the "desire to put oneself in relation to history through violence%E2%80%94/ I feel so connected to whomever, then." The poems frame the traumatic experience of rape by juxtaposing memory and feeling with the tropes and rhetoric of therapy sessions and sensationalist media crime reports. Eisenhower uses multiple narrators within the book's four sections; there are daughters, mothers, fathers, victims, and perpetrators, all deftly differentiated with shifts in tone. Some poems feel private, distant, and dreamlike, as if retreating into themselves in reaction: "the more I make of force as peer, the stranger I am dreamt." The reader collects a set of metaphors by the end%E2%80%94holes, light, water taking the shape of its container%E2%80%94but negatives and opposites make for the book's strongest statements ("if you say positive trauma, then I will"). With lines such as "we're all looking forward to working with what is now a permanent self," Eisenhower points to the ways in which a body that's been exposed to trauma becomes public property forever. (Oct.)