Host (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

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In raw, lyrical poems, Host explores parasitic relationships—between men and women, sons and mothers, and humans and the Earth—and considers their consequences. Throughout this collection, flukes abound, both chance occurrences and flatworms changing their hosts’ behavior. How much control do we have over our lives? To what extent are we being controlled? And how much does it matter in the end?

Revealing the unvarnished pain of mistreatment—whether inflicted maliciously or accidentally—Lisa Fay Coutley examines legacies of abuse in poems that explore how trauma parasitizes bodies, infecting the text, repeating in language and image the injuries the body has been subjected to. How can people heal from intergenerational trauma—and how can humans mend themselves when they live on a planet they abuse daily?

               Ask me why

light can pour warm through a cold bay
window while water under sun is dark
as a closed door. A man’s hand

   erases a girl’s thigh. The trees start starving
       themselves into everyone’s favorite color.
           Her darkest room digs itself

   below her throne. The body knows no
wrong move. The more love, the more.
—Excerpt from “Oubliette”