Poetry. In Laressa Dickey's TWANG readers are offered the increasing power of the voice and the danger of one's words being used against them. As the book's speaker works with healing plants she learns what can save you can also cause you to wretch and release. Repentance, in TWANG, is a goal but far off. What is the speaker offered in its place? "You can leave. You can find some way out." Simultaneously destroying and recreating her life's underpinnings, the speaker in these poems salvages what she can and cuts her strings, looking back across the landscape of memory. This is the trace of a life that moves the way memory flashes in the mind--were we here before? From daughter, woman. From novice, mother. From language, language altered echo of an earlier sound. If language makes and is made by this speaker, it is only language as family, as binding, as singing. TWANG asks how to live in a world in which one is complicit in the sins and stories of one's fathers--and posits that it may yet be possible.
