Southern Illinois University Press, 2013 eISBN: 978-0-8093-3223-6 | Paper: 978-0-8093-3222-9 Library of Congress Classification PS3613.I56994T66 2013 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | AWARDS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Tongue Lyre, Tyler Mills weaves together fragments of myth and memory, summoning the works of Ovid, Homer, and James Joyce to spin a story of violence and the female body. Introducing the recurring lyre figure in the collection—a voice to counter the violence—is Ovid’s Philomena, who, while cruelly rendered speechless, nonetheless sets the reader on an eloquent voyage to discover the body through music, art, and language. Other legendary figures making appearances within—Telemachos, Nestor, Cyclops, Circe, and others—are held up as mirrors to reflect the human form as home. In this dynamic collection, the female body and its relationship to the psyche traverse mythic yet hauntingly familiar contemporary settings as each presents not a single narrative but a progressive exploration of our universal emotional experience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Tyler Mills’s poems have received the Crab Orchard Review’s Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, the Third Coast Poetry Prize, and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets 2007, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Mills received a BA from Bucknell University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois–Chicago.
REVIEWS
"Taken as a collection, Tongue Lyre weaves a new mythology for our contemporary lives, one based in ancient story but resonating with contemporary problems and settings, with continued attention to voice, body, violence, and song. This is an exciting, imaginative, lyrically charged debut."—American Book Review
“From violins to ossuaries, Tongue Lyre is a lovely debut humming with the gift of a lyric ear. Tyler Mills composes a musical odyssey of the human soul where ‘flames ice the grass.’ Whether riding a bicycle ‘the length of an island,’ cleaning a lyre with rice, or caring for ‘a child / found in an empty factory,’ Mills wisely reminds us that ‘when language fails, there is sound.’ A beautiful collection, refreshing in its allusive and tonal valences.”—Karen An-hwei Lee, Author of Phyla of Joy
"There is an aural intelligence in Tongue Lyre that tests its lines as if they were part of an instrument, which, indeed, they are. It is no accident that much of the matter in Tyler Mills’ poems involves the subject of music—honoring it, evoking it, making it. But the poet’s vocal skills are easily matched by her rich visual brilliance—in so many ways Mills’ poetry is the example of how the imagination becomes a narrative less told than sung."—Stanley Plumly
“In fractured lyrics, Tongue Lyre circles an absence, an epicenter, a wound. Through the sensibility of a postmodern Philomela, the nature of unspeakable trauma is simultaneously interrogated, evaded, and—ultimately—recovered and given voice to in artifactual narrative fragments and shards. Palimpsest with myth and dangerous memory, Tongue Lyre is part tapestry, part song—unutterably powerful in its fierce reclamation of music and broken beauty out of flames, collapse, shattering, violence, disaster. Moving with an assured, tumbling associational momentum and flecked with scalpel-chiseled images, virtuoso passagework, these poems will thread their way through your head like a piercing silvered needlework where they will linger. And sing.”—Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Tongue
Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence by T. C. Mills
Tell Me, Muse
Odyssey
Telemachos
Violinist
Nestor
Lesson
Watch for the Blind
Wandering Rocks
Bluff
Proteus
The Chorus Rubs on Children’s Sunscreen
Nausikaa
Cleaning Out the Lyre
After the Lotus
Cyclops
Aiolos and the Bag of Winds
Water Ballad
Ballyhoo or Bulletin?
Circe’s Notes
Oracle
Ossuary
The Sirens
Scylla and Charybdis
Oxen of the Sun
Standing Still
Kalypso
The Chorus at the Pit
Spoken from the Maze Daedalus Made
Rations
Disguised, Athena Says . . .
Performance
Finding Eumaios at the Return
Penelope’s Firebird Weft
Foyer
Chorus: A Museum Is Under Construction
Violin Shop
The Myth of Philomela
Ithaca
In the Chapter “Rodin in Love”
Rose
Tinsel Halo
Cosmos
Other Books in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Back Cover
AWARDS Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award.
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013 eISBN: 978-0-8093-3223-6 Paper: 978-0-8093-3222-9
In Tongue Lyre, Tyler Mills weaves together fragments of myth and memory, summoning the works of Ovid, Homer, and James Joyce to spin a story of violence and the female body. Introducing the recurring lyre figure in the collection—a voice to counter the violence—is Ovid’s Philomena, who, while cruelly rendered speechless, nonetheless sets the reader on an eloquent voyage to discover the body through music, art, and language. Other legendary figures making appearances within—Telemachos, Nestor, Cyclops, Circe, and others—are held up as mirrors to reflect the human form as home. In this dynamic collection, the female body and its relationship to the psyche traverse mythic yet hauntingly familiar contemporary settings as each presents not a single narrative but a progressive exploration of our universal emotional experience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Tyler Mills’s poems have received the Crab Orchard Review’s Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, the Third Coast Poetry Prize, and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets 2007, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Mills received a BA from Bucknell University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois–Chicago.
REVIEWS
"Taken as a collection, Tongue Lyre weaves a new mythology for our contemporary lives, one based in ancient story but resonating with contemporary problems and settings, with continued attention to voice, body, violence, and song. This is an exciting, imaginative, lyrically charged debut."—American Book Review
“From violins to ossuaries, Tongue Lyre is a lovely debut humming with the gift of a lyric ear. Tyler Mills composes a musical odyssey of the human soul where ‘flames ice the grass.’ Whether riding a bicycle ‘the length of an island,’ cleaning a lyre with rice, or caring for ‘a child / found in an empty factory,’ Mills wisely reminds us that ‘when language fails, there is sound.’ A beautiful collection, refreshing in its allusive and tonal valences.”—Karen An-hwei Lee, Author of Phyla of Joy
"There is an aural intelligence in Tongue Lyre that tests its lines as if they were part of an instrument, which, indeed, they are. It is no accident that much of the matter in Tyler Mills’ poems involves the subject of music—honoring it, evoking it, making it. But the poet’s vocal skills are easily matched by her rich visual brilliance—in so many ways Mills’ poetry is the example of how the imagination becomes a narrative less told than sung."—Stanley Plumly
“In fractured lyrics, Tongue Lyre circles an absence, an epicenter, a wound. Through the sensibility of a postmodern Philomela, the nature of unspeakable trauma is simultaneously interrogated, evaded, and—ultimately—recovered and given voice to in artifactual narrative fragments and shards. Palimpsest with myth and dangerous memory, Tongue Lyre is part tapestry, part song—unutterably powerful in its fierce reclamation of music and broken beauty out of flames, collapse, shattering, violence, disaster. Moving with an assured, tumbling associational momentum and flecked with scalpel-chiseled images, virtuoso passagework, these poems will thread their way through your head like a piercing silvered needlework where they will linger. And sing.”—Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year
— -
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Tongue
Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence by T. C. Mills
Tell Me, Muse
Odyssey
Telemachos
Violinist
Nestor
Lesson
Watch for the Blind
Wandering Rocks
Bluff
Proteus
The Chorus Rubs on Children’s Sunscreen
Nausikaa
Cleaning Out the Lyre
After the Lotus
Cyclops
Aiolos and the Bag of Winds
Water Ballad
Ballyhoo or Bulletin?
Circe’s Notes
Oracle
Ossuary
The Sirens
Scylla and Charybdis
Oxen of the Sun
Standing Still
Kalypso
The Chorus at the Pit
Spoken from the Maze Daedalus Made
Rations
Disguised, Athena Says . . .
Performance
Finding Eumaios at the Return
Penelope’s Firebird Weft
Foyer
Chorus: A Museum Is Under Construction
Violin Shop
The Myth of Philomela
Ithaca
In the Chapter “Rodin in Love”
Rose
Tinsel Halo
Cosmos
Other Books in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Back Cover
AWARDS Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | AWARDS