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    Cadence
    Cadence
    Cadence
    Ebook37 pages19 minutes

    Cadence

    By Hannah Stephenson

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    About this ebook

    Having children fundamentally disrupts and remakes us, in terms of body, identity, perspective, and voice. The world shrinks and exponentially expands. Our already fraught human experience of time is shredded and magnified.

    Cadence captures the poet’s point of view as a new mother, reveling in a position of heightened vulnerability and ferocity. The poems in this chapbook are breathless, hyperattentive to others’ needs, and equally in love with earthliness and repulsed by the monstrousness we enact/bear witness to.

    The central tenets of this chapbook: ideas of the body, pregnancy, and motherhood; how becoming a parent destabilizes the self; local anxieties (What if my child doesn’t eat enough? How will I ever sleep again?) and global anxieties (How do we respond to these tumultuous times, full of such hate, racism, and xenophobia? How do we help?); and the ever-deepening desire to protect those who are (increasingly) threatened.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Kent State University Press
    Release dateMar 13, 2018
    ISBN9781631013430
    Cadence

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      Book preview

      Cadence - Hannah Stephenson

      exist.

      BIKINI SEASON

      Oh how much of the world’s darkness comes

      from shame I mean I want to calculate it with you

      At least half And all of us possess a jagged self-splinter

      a hangnail a nurtured thorn to drive deep into skin

      and suck One very poisonous thought

      if I show my soft skin then who will be left to love me

      A protected underbelly leads to back and shoulder pain

      Leads to loathing of one’s core When this pregnancy

      was confirmed the doctor said I would gain 25 to 35 pounds

      and those numbers and the scale made me wince

      Not since my deprivation era had I been subjected

      to such frequent weigh-ins Have you ever played a video

      of women fiercely smiling in jewel-toned spandex and stood

      before them in your living room squatting standing squatting

      while the ringleader smile-shouts Think of bikini season ladies

      Think of it It’s coming The one in the back echoes Short shorts

      sound good right about now The curtains and the blinds all closed

      to spare the neighbors of your movements furtive and unnatural

      Have you punished yourself enough today Have you held a regret

      parade Have you found fault with the alive body that has

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