Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. Her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, the New England Review, The Seneca Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Shenandoah. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review.
Visually, prose tells us that we’re moving through time, through narrative or rhetoric, and visually, poetry tells us we’re moving up and down through lyric, feeling.
I do think that a stranger’s vantage point can be valuable and create interesting reflections or ideas, but it feels important to doing that in a way that was ethical.
I think the older we get, we change, but we still love what we love. We still have the same little shames and little happies and all these things that make us us from when we first started becoming whoever we were going to be.
In his searing, soulful second collection, Gerard uses the language that is poetry to invite the reader in to the experience of his darkest and brightest moments.
And because I had all of that ice to think about, it was difficult to understand what my gynecologist was saying about what he had just done inside of my body.