Swallowing the Stem of Adam’s Apple

By Laura Kiesel

Laura Kiesel plumbs the depths of familial dysfunction, and the wretched inheritance of addiction, thoroughly and with impressive nuance in "Swallowing the Stem of Adam’s Apple," combining integrity and personal grit that’s interwoven throughout her lyrical style. She writes beautifully about her fractured relationship with her mother, and the ripple effect it has had throughout the rest of her life. Her work is an unflinching examination of the erotic implications of romantic relationships and filled with visually exhilarating metaphors and analogies.

Raised a Roman Catholic, Kiesel describes religious rituals and makes use of Christian symbols, while referencing Biblical figures and stories, in ways that are simultaneously subversive and familiar. Illness and death are common themes in her work, whom Kiesel often personifies and treats as old friends--more accurately, rivals or frenemies--competing for her time and attention and that of her loved ones. Instead of keeping them at arm’s length, Kiesel embraces them and the macabre reminders her daily life offers her of her own and others’ shared mortality and finiteness. "Swallowing the Stem of Adam’s Apple" does not demur in its assessment of the self and society but instead navigates the trials and tribulations of the human condition with visceral astuteness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unsolicited Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005810160

Book preview

Swallowing the Stem of Adam’s Apple

Copyright © 2021 Laura Kiesel

All Rights Reserved.

First Edition, 2021.

Published by Unsolicited Press.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Unsolicited Press

Portland, Oregon

www.unsolicitedpress.com

[e-mail]

619-354-8005

Cover Design: Kathryn Gerhardt

Editor: S.R. Stewart

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following journals for their publication of my individual poems:

Upstreet and Blue Lake Review: Stem

Medulla Review: RED and Rhythmless

Fox Chase Review: Hair

Amethyst Arsenic: Clam Poem and Conversation with my Pen

Ibbetson Street: Wish for an Aspiring Herpetologist

Noctua Review: Music

Stone Highway Review: October and Fever Dreams

Naugatuck River Review: What Tea Can’t Cure

Wilderness House Literary Review: A Poem for Uncle, Nature, and The Mercy of Eyelids

Gin Bender: For My Mother and Devils

Poems

Acknowledgements

Poems

Rhythmless

Fever Dreams

Devils

Conversation with My Pen

RED

Clam Poem

Nature

For My Mother

October

Ghosts

Hair

Rust

Wish for an Aspiring Herpetologist

A Poem for Uncle

What Tea Can’t Cure

The Mercy of Eyelids

Some Nights

Primitive

Stem

Music

About the Author

About the Press

Rhythmless

She goes chained to the tremor of a rhythm that never arrives.

—Frederico García Lorca (The Passage of the Siguiriya) 

We have considered want, to be in its bondage.

But to rhythm is another thing. 

I’ve imagined feet soles shoe-laced with cymbals, a mouth smiling

piano-key teeth.

Violin-stringed sinews.

The skies stretched out with sheet music, with music symbols floating

around like snowflakes adrift, to

reach past the town limits to where the city turns gritty and the ground is

strewn with syringes. 

Morning