Jennifer Givhan
ISBN: 978-0-9975805-5-6
35 pages
The poems of Lifeline are deliciously alive, even while mercilessly dissecting trauma and loss. Givhan's searing imagery and candor depicts womanhood in its most raw and honest form — as a gritty mosaic of fractured ghosts held together by blood and resistance.
— Rachel McKibbens, author of Into The Dark & Emptying Field
Glass Poetry Press
Precision · Vision · Inclusion
Lifeline
Cover by Gabrielle Pescador
$8.50
Sample poem from Lifeline:
Rehab
Mrs. Sheets at the rehab center
thinks my husband is The Angel of Death,
calls him Saint Sunday
& wails for him at night, waking
patients down the hall. Some
wounds I cannot heal, he says,
as we walk along the bosque
arguing about my lingering
in the past:
you can't let anyone or anything
go. I scrape my shoulder
on the rusted metal gate along
the canal, & fear
tetanus, which leads
to lockjaw. Mrs. Sheets
fears Jesus doesn't love her since
her affair & subsequent divorce. What's
crazy is the way I jumped into the water.
The way Sunday jumped
in after me. No, the way I revised the story.
He didn't jump. He didn't save me.
I only pretend, like Mrs. Sheets,
that saints can redeem us.
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Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of the full-length collections, Landscape with Headless Mama, which won the 2015 Pleiades Editors' Prize, and Protection Spell, winner of U. of Arkansas Press&$39;s 2016 Miller Williams Series Prize, and two poetry chapbooks, Curanderisma (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2016) and The Daughter's Curse (ELJ, forthcoming 2017). Her honors include an NEA Fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, The Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, The 2015 Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best of the Net 2015, Best New Poets 2013, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, and Southern Humanities Review (where she was a finalist for the 2015 Auburn Witness Prize). She is Poetry Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal and teaches online workshops at The Poetry Barn.
