Description
Women Bones
by Lauren M. Davis
$15.99, paper
979-8-88838-089-5
2023
“Women Bones is a poetry collection exploring women’s issues and adornments in the twenty-first century. Poems primarily focus on the disorder anorexia nervosa, deconstructing the idolization of thinness. Works also discuss the effects of secrets, women left behind, and women seeking peace. Stories of admiration for beauty, strength, perseverance, and recovery are also told. The collection is written in free-verse with influences of both ancient folklores and contemporary abstracts, and often uses the natural world to find answers and connections.”
Lauren M. Davis holds a Masters of Fine Art in poetry from the University of Southern Maine. She worked for many years as an adjunct professor in Indiana and teaches community writing workshops.
Kay Bunker –
This poetry collection has such vibrant imagery. It tells important stories about the struggles of the modern woman. I can’t stop thinking about these poems.
Linda Sienkiewicz (verified owner) –
As Lauren Davis’s poetry shifts perspective from the inner self to family to history, they create a plurality of experiences that ask us to forgive others and forgive ourselves. Blank spaces appear in the poems like blank spaces in memory, blank spaces in a life interrupted, and blank spaces in the body itself, made by trying to be as thin as possible, as if to erase herself. Throughout there are hints of violence in and outside the body, a sense of being ill at ease, storms, earthquakes, falling, drowning, the sounds of trains and coyote’s howls. In her poem “If You Want to be Thin,” Davis writes “And you’ll want to cry / for childhood.” Hers is a journey with no easy answers, yet storms are necessary, she writes, “to nurture what we plant.”
Cassandra Gallagher –
What a beautiful collection. This is absolutely worth the read.
Ryan –
Women Bones is an honest, raw, and intimate collection of poems that avoids easy resolutions. Davis displays a tremendous sense of rhythm and balance and the rare ability to startle her reader awake, to electrocute with vivid imagery and startling connections to the natural world. These poems are about bodies, restriction, thinness, about illness and wellness and beauty and loneliness; about the stories we tell ourselves and the ever-changing, messy experience of being alive in one body. Davis’s lines bring to mind the lucidity of Jane Kenyon’s Boat of Quiet Hours, but Davis’s voice is entirely her own–she owns her unique story, the beautiful and the ugly specifics of her narrative, and it seems she writes as a kind of reckoning with self, with the fluid and shifting nature of her own existence. Davis invites us gently along, and her poems are an unflinching reminder of incredible obstacles we often face alone, outside the public eye, in our bodies and minds and private hours.