Wild Tongue

Rebecca Seiferle

In Seiferle’s fourth book of poems, the tongue is both language and body, and Wild Tongue rages against bits, bridles, and palliatives that attempt to calm or control. It counterbalances divorce and domestic violence with newfound love and cathartic wit. Beautiful and direct, the poems are like cave drawings, inspired by urgency and concern, working into the cracks and contours of truth and wounds. “The human voice on the edge of extinction,” Seiferle writes, “and on that edge, everything wild, unspoken, vital and living, begins to speak out.”

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ISBN: 9781556592621

Format: Paperback

Dogheart Dharma

Oh love is stupid but it’s true, all day I feel
as if I were a dog on a chain—you know, the way
they lie there, bored in their beings, as if their bodies
were loose skins full of emptiness, too alive
to truly fall asleep, too dead to be fully awake,
and, then, periodically, for no apparent reason,
they’ll jump up in some biting fit, snapping
at their own limbs, teeth closing on the fine
hairs of their own coat. Oh my desire
keeps me pacing a circle of dust. I thought
I had broken free of the chain of existence, but
now I am born to a pack of lives—each one
trembling with happiness at hearing my name
called by your sweet voice, your mastering gaze.

About the Author

Rebecca Seiferle was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2004. She has translated two poery collections from the Spanish by César Vallejo, most recently The Black Heralds (Copper Canyon, 2003). Her translations have been included in several anthologies. Her own work has been included in over twenty-five anthologies and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Lithuanian, and Latvian. She has been a poet-in-residence at Brandeis University and has taught in the Stonecoast MFA Program, the Port Townsend Writers Conference, the …

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