Vertebrae | Ashley Trabue

on Vertebrae “I feel these poems the most in my jaw.  Perhaps because the mandible appears to bloom from the spine. Or perhaps it’s because Trabue seems to allow everything within her a chance to claw its way out of her mouth, and my jaw burns with that same desire.  The way these poems in Trabue’s debut chapbook stack upon one another, the way the lines within them misalign and break are not the upright spinal column we immediately recall when we hear the title Vertebrae. They’re stronger, sturdier, perfectly articulated and complete with the right types of holes—the spaces where air whistles sweetly through them. Trabue writes viscerally into places normally illuminated in x-rays and scans. She gives flesh and tendons and stretch to even those tight and beloved dwellings, embracing the female body and all of its complexities. The sweat of its relationships. The blood it knows well. The minds it molds. The coming into itself. The bodies it receives. The bodies it bears. And the loss.