The Lumberjack's Dove: A Poem

By GennaRose Nethercott and Louise Gluck

In the ingenious and vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose Nethercott describes a woodsman who cuts off his hand with an axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand shapeshifts into a dove. Far from representing just an event of pain and loss in the body, this incident spirals outward to explore countless facets of being human, prompting profound reflections on sacrifice and longing, time and memory, and—finally—the act of storytelling itself. The lumberjack, his hand, and the axe that separated the two all become participants in the story, with unique perspectives to share and lessons to impart. “I taught your fathers how to love,” Axe says to the acorns and leaves around her. “I mean to be felled, sliced to lumber, & reassembled into a new body.”

Inflected with the uncanny enchantment of modern folklore and animated by the sly shifting of points of view, The Lumberjack’s Dove is wise, richly textured poetry from a boundlessly creative new voice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780062853684

Book preview

Part I

It’s the same old story:

A lumberjack loses a hand to his own axe. The hand becomes a dove. The hand tries to fly away but the lumberjack catches it beneath his shoe. You know this story. The lumberjack ties one end of a string to the hand & the other end to his belt. Then the lumberjack walks out of the forest, the airborne hand fluttering along behind.

There are three rules of storytelling:

1. Only tell a story if you have to. If you can survive without telling it, keep mum.

2. A story is a two-way mirror. Don’t think the characters cannot see you. It’s safest to assume they can always see you, & they know exactly where you

Reviews for The Lumberjack's Dove

[cdealba-838244 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Lumberjack’s Dove is a tender and haunting legend, a book-length poem that explores what it means to tell a story, and what it means to listen to one. By turns whimsical and emotionally devastating, I’d recommend this book to anyone who is interested in folklore, poetry, or the language of loss.