When The Mouth Can’t Speak The Body Will by Jane Berger Herschlag

When Jane Berger Herschlag began to write about her experiences of sexual assault at the hands of her father, fellow writers told her she was brave.  But it would be a mistake to describe Herschlag’s When The Mouth Can’t Speak The Body Will as merely courageous.  This collection of poems and pictures is about finding form for the unspeakable.  It’s about the difficult creative work of tempering and forging an “unchildhood” into words, images, and metaphors that become containers for the adult writer—“to color me/outline my form/substantiate my shadow.”  Across poems that are deeply physical, at once disturbing and affecting, Herschlag approaches the act of writing as a means of retraining her immune system and reinventing her own corporeal form.  Ekphrastic poems are paired with paintings and photographs that depict a natural world once menacing, now inviting.  Along the way, Herschlag looks both inside and outside herself, weaving other stories of unspeakable suffering and loss alongside her own in ways that create shared meaning.
–Q.M. Zhang, author of Accomplice to Memory