Things I Didn't Do with This Body

Told in six parts, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body sings in myriad voices and forms—ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness.

Bedecked in Fenty and Shalimar, Amanda Gunn’s startling debut, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body, invites you to read with all of your senses and gives fresh meaning to the phrase a body of work. Told in six parts, this collection sings in myriad voices and forms—ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness. Both tender and emotionally raw, these poems interweave explorations of family and interrogations of history, including an unforgettable sequence that meditates on the life of Harriet Tubman. With Tubman’s portrait perched above her writing desk, Gunn pens poems that migrate from South to North, from elegy to prayer, from borrowed shame to self-acceptance. 

Writing with frankness and honesty, Gunn finds no thought, no memory, too private: a father’s verbal blow, a tense visit to a gynecologist’s table, the longing to be “erased/by a taxi at 50 miles an hour,” and grief at the loss of two former lovers, decades apart. Death is familiar here, yet we find softness, grace, and hope in the culinary lessons learned in warm family kitchens, in the communal laughter of a rehab center’s common room, and in the rewards and pleasures of the fat erotic. With poems as malleable as the skin that “misplaced one hundred nine pounds” and filled it again, Gunn proves that, for the Black body, memory often presents the heaviest weight. Things I Didn’t Do with This Body is a reminder that “carried in the body is the future, the present, and the past.” The most capable thing a body can do is remember and bear it and live.

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Things I Didn't Do with This Body

Told in six parts, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body sings in myriad voices and forms—ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness.

Bedecked in Fenty and Shalimar, Amanda Gunn’s startling debut, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body, invites you to read with all of your senses and gives fresh meaning to the phrase a body of work. Told in six parts, this collection sings in myriad voices and forms—ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness. Both tender and emotionally raw, these poems interweave explorations of family and interrogations of history, including an unforgettable sequence that meditates on the life of Harriet Tubman. With Tubman’s portrait perched above her writing desk, Gunn pens poems that migrate from South to North, from elegy to prayer, from borrowed shame to self-acceptance. 

Writing with frankness and honesty, Gunn finds no thought, no memory, too private: a father’s verbal blow, a tense visit to a gynecologist’s table, the longing to be “erased/by a taxi at 50 miles an hour,” and grief at the loss of two former lovers, decades apart. Death is familiar here, yet we find softness, grace, and hope in the culinary lessons learned in warm family kitchens, in the communal laughter of a rehab center’s common room, and in the rewards and pleasures of the fat erotic. With poems as malleable as the skin that “misplaced one hundred nine pounds” and filled it again, Gunn proves that, for the Black body, memory often presents the heaviest weight. Things I Didn’t Do with This Body is a reminder that “carried in the body is the future, the present, and the past.” The most capable thing a body can do is remember and bear it and live.

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Things I Didn't Do with This Body

Things I Didn't Do with This Body

by Amanda Gunn
Things I Didn't Do with This Body
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Things I Didn't Do with This Body

Things I Didn't Do with This Body

by Amanda Gunn

Overview

Told in six parts, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body sings in myriad voices and forms—ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness.

Bedecked in Fenty and Shalimar, Amanda Gunn’s startling debut, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body, invites you to read with all of your senses and gives fresh meaning to the phrase a body of work. Told in six parts, this collection sings in myriad voices and forms—ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness. Both tender and emotionally raw, these poems interweave explorations of family and interrogations of history, including an unforgettable sequence that meditates on the life of Harriet Tubman. With Tubman’s portrait perched above her writing desk, Gunn pens poems that migrate from South to North, from elegy to prayer, from borrowed shame to self-acceptance. 

Writing with frankness and honesty, Gunn finds no thought, no memory, too private: a father’s verbal blow, a tense visit to a gynecologist’s table, the longing to be “erased/by a taxi at 50 miles an hour,” and grief at the loss of two former lovers, decades apart. Death is familiar here, yet we find softness, grace, and hope in the culinary lessons learned in warm family kitchens, in the communal laughter of a rehab center’s common room, and in the rewards and pleasures of the fat erotic. With poems as malleable as the skin that “misplaced one hundred nine pounds” and filled it again, Gunn proves that, for the Black body, memory often presents the heaviest weight. Things I Didn’t Do with This Body is a reminder that “carried in the body is the future, the present, and the past.” The most capable thing a body can do is remember and bear it and live.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781619322714
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication date: 05/23/2023
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Amanda Gunn grew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as a PhD candidate in English at Harvard where she studies poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Her recent work appears in Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and Narrative Magazine.

Read an Excerpt

Things I Didn’t Do With This Body 

& Things I Did

I didn’t bear a child with it, bear a drunk friend’s arm around its shoulders,

bear it over a fence in one go, bear it from Harlem to Wall Street by foot,

run it until it vomited, run it until it vibrated with joy, lean it long against

a redwood it had hiked to, lay it on the earth beneath the aurora borealis,

march it white-laced until it wed, march it in Baltimore for a killed Black

man, march it to war until it was dead, bear a lover eager on its spine, bear

it back to its natal soil, bear it to the lake’s center under the swift awesome

power of its legs. Bear witness: I did not make its child. I didn’t bear it to

the home it asked me for. Instead, as if by stumbling, as if by walking

backward even, as if the beginning & not the end held the drum & cymbal

& jazz hands,


I bore three lovers in its mouth, bore

a blow to its cheek, bore the snap & drag of the Atlantic at high tide, bared

its breasts on that beach, scored its ankle with a knife twelve thin times,

bored into the white underflesh of its thigh, bore its scars, bore tattoos

to cover its scars, bore hot wax where it was tenderest, bore on its face a

heavy, pretty face, bore smoke deep in its tissues, bore the soft, bore the

love of its family, withheld from it embraces, withheld from it a decent

meal, bore love for the boy who refused it, bore the death of the boy who

didn’t, bore the weight it made from the pills I had handed it, bore

its joints’ irreparable ache, bore the turned sweet smell beneath

its breast, taught water to bear it so I could rest, bore its sloughings, bore

its swellings, bore its manifold solitudes, and on the rare, keen nights

it stayed with me, I bore its bright fragrant solitary intolerable pleasure.


Prayer 

Lord let me hand you my burden my body it’s yours  what will you do with it 

my bones are gone to gravel under weight 

I loved her  I loved her body as it 

grew broad spilled forward filled in its loosened skin filled in  with new-found weight 

we stayed at the bar too late we ate with relish chorizo syruped with figs 

I put my cheek against the fat of her belly it felt  cool I felt light as if I had risen taken  a form yet to be baked  

I’d stomached every pill I was asked to take some  filled my gut 

with a hunger I couldn’t sate so sick  from other pills I halved  or quartered meals 

misplaced one hundred nine pounds of weight  women who barely knew me said you’re so thin so pretty  so lucky you lost a person  it’s so so so so great  she fed my body she loved me as I 

grew plump again shed my wrinkled skin slowly like  heartache 

my breasts so heavy I thought  they’ll burst 

my breasts so heavy in her hands 

can a body burst I think a body can I’ve known its juice  pills tricked my brain into a motherhood without fruit

I made milk & I burst 

I thought what new thing are you body what  are these droplets in my palm

I thought taste it

I thought maybe you’ll remember your mother you must have felt  weightless in her arms she waits 

for you to call you hand her your laden days she bears you  she gained baby weight to bear you  she lost weight 

her muscles grew slack & weak a woman who knew her well said girl  you’re wasting away  my mother said  

they took you from me in the hospital you didn’t know me you wouldn’t feed  it was our very first grief 

don’t taste no wait for the real thing the authentic thing  there will be other milks to taste 

there will be the sweet fat weight of a child a child 

my body then refused to make  it was busy carrying weight  too late too late too late  I ask is this it   is this weightlessness

I am weak in my bones from this weight there is bone  in the milk of my knees O sweet Christ 

take half my gut or half my legs or half of what’s left of my life  you’re holding the knife


Refuge

You gaze at me from above my desk, your lips

unsmiling, eyes daring me, well met by the lens

and fixed. Vexed at standing still. Your body so

small in the world—shoulders rolled forward

in a servant’s cast. Quiet and radical and fast:

a fisher of men. Thief. Chief, even then, of our

destiny, seeker of confederate trap and bomb.

Dumb, as in the idiot your enslaver thought you,

No threat. Laboring to pay a debt that wasn’t yours.

What debts have I made and not yet paid?

With the manic flash of a plastic card for Timbs

that keep me safe and warm, come rain, come snow,

this fine Fenty glow, and the perfumed plume that rises

from my five crystal bottles of No5. These things

I seek, I keep and horde and somehow take for

being alive or for being a citizen, one who can afford

these bespoke shelves packed end-to-end with

American wealth. There’s poetry. And, too,

this blessing to my labors: your photograph

an epigraph to every poem I write, your left hand

gripping hard the right. Most faithless slave,

faithful sister. It’s a refuge now, the swamp,

the trees where you had to hide and wait and plan.

Freeze and scrounge. Shit and ache and say goodbye.

And travel light. I once got an apartment tour

from a woman so apt to minimize that she shaved

her brows. Her eyes stone—blue like slate.

And bare as a bone her face remained. She wore

all white and ate on the floor, while she

and her husband were rich as earth, the earth

you worked and trod and left. Out Bestpitch

Road, I stand on a bridge, above still waters

that you knew well, a thick and weedy, fecund

hell—or was it heaven? Weedy creepers, waters deeper

than my boots, a day-rose moon that dulls my face,

and greenish vapors that whip all trace of aldehydes

from my shivering skin. What boon would I

have asked back then—of this refuge, of this both

safe and hostile place? A dryish space to tuck

my head and rest my bones as long as the dead.



Table of Contents

I.

Father at Table

Highway

Shells

My Father Speaks

All Things

'A Long Ways From Home'

To Kati Who Doesn't Remember

Monarch

Girl

After Surgery

The Last Day / Romania 1986

Look

II.

Araminta

39 Objects at the Smithsonian

Mystic

Coda: Refuge

III.

Go North

Notes on a Dream of Dying

Ordinary Sugar

Hypersisters

Repair Work

Admissions

Collect

IV.

The Name For

Chronic

Is It OK

Every Letter Every Word Every Page

Bad Romance

Good Romance

Level

V.

Wake

It's like We—

Return

Tyrant

Never Now

What You Meant

Kaleidoscope

VI.

Baker

Shalimar

Morning at Crash Boat Beach

Poetic Exercise in the Service of Love

Patience

Household

Stormwatching in Campania

Happy and Well

Elegy

Prayer

Things I Didn't Do With This Body & Things I Did

Like This

From the B&N Reads Blog
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Poetry
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American poetry
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American Poetry
Other American Poetry
American poetry

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