Spitting Image

by Kara van de Graaf

Overview

Kara van de Graaf’s debut collection heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary poetry. Through poems that balance personal recollection with ekphrasis, science, and meditation, Van de Graaf searches for answers in the fluctuating relationship between the body and the self.
 
Taking as its primary theme the exploration of the female body in current culture, Spitting Image considers the myriad intersections of the body and gender, desire, relationships, and otherness. Van de Graaf interrogates underrepresented elements of the female experience, especially the physical, rhetorical, and aesthetic limitations of fatness in poetry and other arts. She then complicates those limitations through her use of innovative forms and imaginative verse, implicitly calling for poetry to engage with the female form in fresh ways. Throughout, Van de Graaf’s poems ask: In a time where we have more agency to define ourselves than ever before, what barriers still remain? What do our bodies mean to who we are?
 
At turns oblique and direct, Van de Graaf’s poems strive to create space for themselves not only in the field of contemporary poetry but also in a larger world that has been prone to ignoring or shaming women for their bodies. That these poems succeed on both counts is a testament to this remarkable new poet, who claims “That millimeter of space that means / all of us are apart, that means / we can never really touch / anything. . . . Yes, I want that, too.”
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809336623
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/14/2018
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Kara van de Graaf is the recipient of the Hoepfner Literary Award and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, among other honors. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Best New Poets 2010. She is a cofounder and an editor of Lightbox Poetry and an assistant professor of English at Utah Valley University.
 

Read an Excerpt

POEM ON THE VERGE OF INTERRUPTION

Things keep happening. I keep sewing
the seam of the ripped shirt, the needle

sawing back and forth, its slow way
of binding. The cardinal flying,

the sound of traffic on the avenue,
drivers muted in their cars, safe

behind glass. And you in the kitchen
at the big basin washing potatoes,

the brush back and forth until they're clean,
until they hardly have skin at all. Things

keep happening. No one stops anyone else
on the street, no one notices small signs:

the light bulb stuttering out, a flash of red
blowing across the sidewalk, the subtle,

unnoticeable coming of silence, easily,
like the movement into sleep. My palm

working, the silver needle. The raw potatoes
glistening in the basin, clean and white as eyes.


SONNET WITH A WISHBONE IN THE THROAT

I trussed the hen and cut the breast
clean, pliable, soft with cartilage.
I thought my mouth could swallow it
whole, but the bone went brittle, broke
through the skin of my neck like two
thorns. Its prongs scissored out above
my clavicle. Windpipe split in a perfect Y.
When I speak, each phrase kaleidoscopes,
modifies, a duet of whispers I lip into air.
I sound sweet when I want to be bitter. I bite
back my anger's flare. My voice box grows
into an echo chamber, buzzes double-alive.
Forgive me, I must say everything twice:
once to punish, once to entice.


PORTRAIT OF MY MOTHER AS THE VIRGIN QUEEN

Above all, what I have feared is love.
I have been afraid of my body, of its weakness,
its need that feels like a pail filling slowly
with milk. I have watched kids at the teat,

how their mouths are formed to pull
every sweetness toward them, to suck
the body tired, the nipple raw and jewel-like.
Who would choose such a bitter ornament?

Who could understand a creature that gladly
admits anything that arrives at its gates?
I have put my hand to the soft stomach
of a doe, and I have heard her throat

bleating in the labor. I prefer to let the rod
do my speaking. I prefer to let them call my name.


THE DOUBLES

In the dressing room at Macy's,
I run into all my old bodies.
We are reunited when I hear them
shuffling in the walls, sense them
beneath the dirty carpet. Their hips
lurching out of drywall. Their breasts
swelling against the concrete floor.
I congratulate one on her thin legs.
We commiserate about side-boob.
We try on dresses from the junior's section
and laugh. Relive our proms, our red-haired
date who cried the whole night
about that other girl. We kiss. Arm-wrestle.
Bitch-slap. Wish we were never born.
When we part we look at each other longingly,
doe-eyed. The way two mirrors,
when you put them opposite, reflect
each other forever and ever.

 

Table of Contents

Poem on the Verge of Interruption 3

Spitting Image 4

Poem in the Corner of a Young Girl's Mouth 5

La Monstrua Vestida 6

Horsefly 8

Southern Gothic 9

The Poetics of Fatness 10

Epithalamium 11

Interior 12

Starlings in Winter 14

Poem in the Eardrum 16

Washing 18

Splitting Image 19

Sonnet with a Wishbone in the Throat 21

Floating Girl 25

Poem at the Bottom of the Allegheny River 26

Lower Animals 27

Portrait of My Mother as the Virgin Queen 30

Poem on the End of a Lure 31

The Fisherman 32

My Mother's Pantry 33

Portrait of My Mother as Captain James Cook 35

Ode to Sea Scurvy 36

Ode to Hardtack 37

Spyglass 38

Giants of the Sea 39

Dream with Water beneath the Floorboards 41

Poem Traveling in a Circuit 45

Contrapposto 46

The Doubles 48

Excavated Girl 49

Spaceflight 50

Taking Up Space 52

Poem in the Shape of a Grand Piano 53

Madame la Guillotine 54

Queen Ant 55

Echo Chamber 57

My Apology 60

Scheveningen 61

Burned Girl 62

Controlled Burn 63

Poem Wired with Knob-and-Tube 64

Notes 67

Acknowledgments 69

Editorial Reviews

‘Things keep happening,’ Kara van de Graaf begins with her fine careful eye and ear on the large and the small—just sewing a seam as someone scrubs potatoes in the next room. Then it’s to deeper mysteries rendered strange. Suddenly, we never saw them before!—crow and horsefly, the ant colony’s queen (‘how many times /she had labored to repeat herself’), the giant sequoias, sunfish, whale (‘you patron saint / of taking up space’), starlings, dark wheeling flocks of them. And always the body fascinates and troubles, at home or in spaceflight where the astronaut’s bones keep ‘hollowing / at their center.’ Treasure this poet, her close and her far.”—Marianne Boruch, author of Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing
 
“Shame is the loneliest of the emotions, and one that must be taught. Van de Graaf’s book is the pained, graceful unfurling of such shame, with the despised body as its locale. Paradox is wise but fraught, and both states abound in this gorgeous, refined book. Spitting Image joins the library of crucial books on how we learn to hate ourselves, and who it was who taught us. Yet it is more than that—it is wisdom literature, a voice extending past each deceiving thing.”—Katie Ford, author of Blood Lyrics

“When the arrow hits the bull’s-eye, we marvel at the precision and skill of the archer. Kara van de Graaf’s debut collection, Spitting Image, is such a skilled and powerful book. These poems behold the human form and know ‘our flesh is never / our flesh alone.’ This poet is the archer, the arrow, and the flight. She sees and sings to us, and her candor and her tenderness make this book a triumph.”—Steve Scafidi, author of To the Bramble and the Briar

“These poems are exquisite, vivacious to the eye and ear. But the beauty of these poems is always in tension with their dark thematic cargo: the body’s vulnerability, the body’s ardor and hunger, and the complex legacies that a person bears. Spitting Image is a book of pain, but it is also a book of canny grace. As the speaker in one poem knowingly says, ‘Forgive me, I must say everything twice: / once to punish, once to entice.’ And here van de Graaf exemplifies still another definition of craft—craft as cunning.”—Rick Barot, author of Chord
 

From the Publisher