Strike

Author: Rebeca Dunham  Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose (2019) “The poems of Rebecca Dunham’s Strike invoke the terse, noiseless monstrousness of the toxic-domestic, the ‘once-us,’ in which ‘to fall numb is not to fall / out of pain.’ This collection is Plathian in its riven depiction of anger, which both ‘presses/down and in,’ where denial ‘is beaten to silver foil, to silver leaf,’ and in which ‘[o]ver the butcher / paper’s sheets’ her ‘red story sprawls.’ In poems whose edges are honed on a whetstone of impeccable craft, and which delve into history, archetype, and ekphrasis, Dunham exposes the face that ‘ripples beneath her mask’ and builds a ravishing myth of the unveiled lyric interior.”  –Diane Seuss “In Rebecca Dunham’s gorgeous new book there are secrets, shames, and a fury that bites like frost. Strike reminds me that ‘fidelity / demands not only virtue’s deep mortal stab, / but the love of it’; that anger burns clean; that forgiveness can burden the one who was hurt, a