SINK

by Desiree Dallagiacomo

Overview

Desiree Dallagiacomo's debut book grapples with the intersections of family and mental health.

SINK asks and answers hard questions about grief, lineage, death and all manner of inheritance.
What is one left with when they come from a family that has nothing to its name but loss?

Throughout, Dallagiacomo weighs the cost of what it is to be alive and a woman in a landscape that makes being alive and a woman uninviting.

SINK approaches grief and depression not as a tourist, but instead with the power and nuance of someone who has survived and made the most of their survival.

Advance praise for SINK

These poems are… a graceful and patient anthem for survival, girlhood, and family. Dallagiacomo has proven here that menoir and poetics are so frequently one and the same, and at their best, belong together.
-Olivia Gatwood, Author of New American Best Friend

SINK, is a testament to survival, inheritance, and the fierce tenderness and precision needed to confront memory. Like a memoir in verse, each poem is tethered to something pulsing.
-Hieu Minh Nguyen, Author of Not Here

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943735495
Publisher:	Button Poetry
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Series:	Button Poetry
Pages:	104
Sales rank:	689,827
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Desiree Dallagiacomo is a poet, performer, and educator. She is the program director & lead teaching artist at Forward Arts, a youth spoken word and social justice writing non-profit in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and she has been a finalist at every major national poetry slam. Her poems have been featured widely and a collection of her work has been adapted for the Vagina Monologues at Tulane University. She is the co-host of a Southern Poetry podcast, Drawl, and in 2016 she founded an annual writing retreat in rural New Mexico for young writers.

Read an Excerpt

Pregnant, my mother worked in the laundry room of the hospital folding sheets and washed towels for 8 months in exchange for a place to have her 5th child. Each year I grow older, a quiet ceremony for the girl that was born in a bed because a woman woke every morning, building my body inside of her body, and found me a home before I was a name. I do not know what you believe love to be, but in my house it is that. It is that.

Table of Contents

My First Altar 1

When giving birth 4

For My Mother 5

Reno, Nevada 6

Medford, Oregon 7

Senor Frogs 8

Strength 9

Single Mothers Can Yell Wherever They Want 10

B on Elm Street Behind the Fairgrounds, 1999 11

Broken Sonnet for the Closeness of Grooming 12

10 Candles 13

Aunt Diana Opens the Trunk of Her Pathfinder and She Cannot Stop Crying as All the Presents for the Homeless Kids Fall Out 14

The Gutter 15

Girlhood (noun) 16

With Vigor 17

Pine Street, Taser 18

The Small, Breakable Nature of Gods 20

Child Protective Services Takes B and All His Siblings on a Tuesday Afternoon 21

Knots 22

Origin Story 25

Everything to Call Him Before Rapist 27

Be Mine 29

In State Prison, No One Keeps Their Underwires 30

Pleasant Valley State Prison with Inmate Number F-49837 31

A Bluejay Flies into the Mental Hospital 32

Sink 34

Grief Vignettes for Aunt Diana 36

Written 5 Years after Your Body Was Found 39

13 Ways of Looking at a Rapist 42

Thighs Say 44

Salties 46

It Took My Mother 3 Days to Give Birth to Me 47

Nine 48

Joliet Street 49

One Side of an Ongoing Dialogue with Sharon, My Therapist 50

I tell you my heart is like on avocado seed 52

The Funny Wind of the Heart Is Not a Reliable Weathervane 53

The Autumn I Found Out You Were Dead 54

Jemez Springs, New Mexico 55

I Break Like a Fever 56

The Best Way I Can Tell You about the Resiliency of Tenderness Is with a Portrait of the Pitbull I Share My Bed With 58

Talk // Talk // Talk 59

Where Did You Get that Pick-Up Line? You Should Drop It Back Off 61

Sum of Her Parts 63

A Man Says to a Woman I Love, If I Caught You in Bed with Someone Else, I'd Shoot You Both 65

For Keepsies with B 66

Your Doctor Says Dementia 68

At Last 69

Grief Vignettes for Kaiya 70

Of All the Muscles 72

A Series of Portraits More Intimate Than Sex 73

You Became in a Town No One Has Ever Heard Of 74

Ode to My Strap-On Dildo and Ode for My Love on His Hands and Knees in Front of Me 75

All the Plus-Size Models in the Magazines Are Actually Regular Size 76

I Forgive You 79