The Wendys / Allison Benis White.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

White, Allison Benis, 1972- author.

Contributor:

Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychic trauma.

Women--Violence against.

Women.

Williams, Wendy Orlean, 1948-1998--Poetry.

Williams, Wendy Orlean.

Mothers--Poetry.

Mothers.

Women--Violence against--Poetry.

Death--Poetry.

Death.

Grief--Poetry.

Grief.

Psychic trauma--Poetry.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

65 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Tribeca, [New York] : Four Way Books, [2020]

Summary:

"A powerful meditation on grief and the radiating effects of violence against women. "Because it is easier to miss a stranger / with your mother's name," Allison Benis White instead writes about five women named Wendy as a way into the complex grief that still lingers after the death of a sixth Wendy, the author's long-absent mother. A series of epistolary poems addressed to Wendy O. Williams becomes an occasion for the speaker to eulogize as well as reflect on the singer's life and eventual suicide: "What kind of love is death, I'm asking?" In the section devoted to Wendy Torrance, the fictional wife from The Shining who was bludgeoned to death by her husband, the speaker muses on the inadequacy of language to resolve or even contain grief in the wake of trauma: "A book is a coffin. Hoarsely. A white sheet draped over the cage of screaming." Ultimately, The Wendys is a book of silences and space in which tenderness and violence exist in exquisite tension. "If to speak is to die," Benis White writes in "Ignis Fatuus," "I will whisper.""-- Provided by publisher.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

ISBN:

9781945588426

194558842X

OCLC:

1110672779

Publisher Number:

99984131159