Strings Attached

By Diane DeCillis

In Strings Attached, poet Diane DeCillis takes inspiration from the story of the elephant calf with a thin rope tied to its leg. Even when it grows into a massive animal, the elephant thinks the same string still restrains it and never attempts to break free. This powerful, funny, and sometimes self-deprecating collection considers all the ways that strings bind us in relationships and explores their constant tightening and loosening. Although we may never sever the strings attached to our wounds, DeCillis shows that when given enough slack we can create the illusion of having been set free.

The poems in Strings Attached consider tension in a variety of relationships. The short string of an American girl raised in Detroit by a resentful Lebanese grandmother whose culture values boys over girls. The attachment to a strong mother who exemplifies feminism but who is mostly absent in order to support the family. The cosmopolitan father who abandons but captivates, and the strings of relationships with older men, built on longing for the missing father. The long strings of a secret life that teach you to be distant. The strings that cuff you to your home, and the triumph of loosening them after years of agoraphobia. The frayed strings that come from being too American in a Lebanese culture. The strings of food and tradition that connect to family and friends.

DeCillis’s verse reflects an insistent search for identity and the happy discovery that outsider status can be a good thing, a kind of earned badge that provides new ways of seeing. All poetry readers will relate to the personal and perceptive verse of this debut collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: May 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780814340141

Diane DeCillis

Diane DeCillis’s poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and Best American Poetry. She was awarded the Crucible Poetry Prize and Ocean Prize, and won the MacGuffin National Poet Hunt. Her work has appeared in CALYX, The North Atlantic Review, Nimrod International Journal, Connecticut Review, Gastronomica, and numerous other journals. She is co-editor of Mona Poetica, an anthology dedicated to the Mona Lisa, and until recently owned an award-winning art gallery in Birmingham, Michigan.

Book preview

Made in Michigan Writers Series

GENERAL EDITORS

Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts

M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University

ADVISORY EDITORS

Melba Joyce Boyd

Wayne State University

Stuart Dybek

Western Michigan University

Kathleen Glynn

Jerry Herron

Wayne State University

Laura Kasischke

University of Michigan

Thomas Lynch

Frank Rashid

Marygrove College

Doug Stanton

Keith Taylor

University of Michigan

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

STRINGS ATTACHED

POEMS BY

Diane DeCillis

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DETROIT

© 2014 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-0-8143-4013-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4014-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013950621

Publication of this book was made possible by a generous gift from The Meijer Foundation.

For Louie, Mom and Dad

Contents

Acknowledgments

I

Margin of Error

The Myth of Father

As Pressing Is to Flowers

In a Dream My Skin

Still Life Flowering

The Way You Look

Seeing Like Cézanne

View from a Room, NYC

Fugitive Laughter

Quiet Rooms

Agoraphobia Contrapuntal

Finding Fathers

Postcards of Home and Homesick

Childhood Revisited as a Musical

Dreams of My Father

Lost on the Champs-Élysées

La Vie en Gris

Reconsidering Yellow

When You Cannot Sleep

Foreboding Frog

Physics for Dummies

Mr. Right

Falling in Love at the Speed of the William Tell Overture

An Orgasm Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Punch Drunk Love

Touching the Wound

Last Night I Dreamed I Stole the Croissants

Power of Suggestion

Happy-Go-Lucky

To Lean

Thinking about What Matters

II

Milk

Without Child

Room Full of Children Staring at Me

The Grammar of Memory

Arranged Marriage

Yellow According to Rilke

Artemesia Absinthium

Weeping Women

Cubist Still Life

Origami Pantoum

Looking for Stephen Dunn

Body Language

Lee Miller’s Father

Phantom Limbs

Nest

Creation of Birds

Magritte’s Mother’s Nightgown

A Day at the Lake with Gertrude Stein

Defitato

Fish Feel Pain

When Chefs Have Nightmares

Ingratiating the Monster

What Would Hitchcock Do?

Missing Ingredients

Grape Leaves

The Meaning of Life

How to Fall Gently from the Precarious Pedestal

The Botanist and Her Amaryllis

To Be Fed

Baklava Killed My Father

Music from Another Room

Strings Attached

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the editors of the following journals for first publishing these poems, some in slightly different versions.

A Gathering of Tribes: "Nest"; Ascent: Touching the Wound; Bayou: When You Cannot Sleep; Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review: To Be Fed; Cadillac Cicatrix: Defitato; CALYX: Quiet Rooms; Cape Rock: The Grammar of Memory; Connecticut Review: Magritte’s Mother’s Nightgown; Drumvoices Revue: Grape Leaves; Eclipse: Origami Pantoum; Evansville Review: La Vie en Gris; Flint Hills Review: "Falling in Love at the Speed of the William Tell ‘Overture’"; Gargoyle: A Day at the Lake With Gertrude Stein; Gastronomica: Missing Ingredients; Green Hills Literary Lantern: Fish Feel Pain; George Washington Review: Margin of Error; The MacGuffin: Arranged Marriage, Cubist Still Life, Postcards of Home and Homesick, An Orgasm Is a Terrible Thing to Waste, What Would Hitchcock Do?, Seeing Like Cézanne, and Yellow According to Rilke; Madison Review: Milk; Nimrod: Childhood Revisited as a Musical and Looking for Stephen Dunn; North Atlantic Review: In a Dream My Skin; Owen Wister Review: How To Fall Gently from the Precarious Pedestal; Pisgah Review: Mr. Right; Poet Lore: Dreams of My Father; Sanskrit: Music from Another Room; Schuylkill Valley Journal: The Meaning of Life and Last Night I Dreamed I Stole the Croissants; Scriblerus Press: Physics for Dummies; Slipstream: Punch Drunk Love; Soundings East: Reconsidering Yellow; South Carolina Review: Weeping Women; South Dakota Review: Lee Miller’s Father; Spillway: Lost on the Champs-Élysées; Sulphur River Literary Review: Creation of Birds and Without Child; Westview: Happy-Go-Lucky; Yalobusha Review: The Way You Look; Zone 3: To Lean

A heartfelt thank-you to the following friends and peers who were generously supportive in the making of these poems: Mary Jo Firth Gillett, Elizabeth Volpe, Rebecca Rank Perry, Christine Rhein, Carol Was, Sharron Singleton, Mindy La Pere, and the talented poets in the Tuesday night group. A special thank-you to Annie Martin and the staff at WSU Press for their kind support, to Rafal Olbinski for his marvelous artwork, to John D. Lamb for nurturing us with Springfed Arts, and to M.