The Tongue Has No Bone by Susan Yanos

This beautiful debut offers the world of a “farmwife,” which means being wed to a farmer and also the land, for better or worse, snowy fields or drought, wild birds or slain pets.  It means being the one who works far away for cash and health insurance and also the one who pieces a quilt when a male relative ends his life.  I love the brutally enjambed lines crammed with details in this book about marriage in the biggest sense possible.  Of this book of faith and complaint from a “poet among butchers, farmers, truckers/ clerks,” I can only say, listen to this voice!

–Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author Shale Play

Susan Yanos’ poems transform the daily work of farm life into sacrament and the earthly relations of husband and wife into liturgy. There is bitterness and blessing here, biting laughter and true wisdom earned through suffering. As she remarks about the birth of her daughter: “You slipped from me then / as you slip from me now / a blessing / a wound.” And this is a wounded book whose artfulness fulfills its obligation to both flesh and spirit, never falling prey to dualities or false hierarchies. Yanos walks a difficult, even dangerous path, because of her honesty, yet she does not abandon her “flesh-robing God” as she makes beauty from a weary and hurt world.

–Todd Davis, author of Native Species and Winterkill