Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Women's Studies. PSYCHOGYNECOLOGY is a mythic manifestation of feminine energy cured into a spell. An inconceivable moment jarred from the maw of a bird's warble, a worn banister in a house left to rot. These poems tussle & chew with the repression housed and implanted historically and culturally, through centuries and narratives, in the female body. Like storage units, these poems elicit a feeling of forgotten objects, of power to regain. A counsel of women driven to a last pack in a rural Indiana gas station. The relation of the man with the woman, the woman with the man. The invisibly dark matter tabooed out of tradition. Somehow ancient & precisely of this moment, Wendy Lee Spacek's poems minutely & intricately eschew the distinct beauty, sorrow, & tragedy of the customs and relations between genders between humans and what they have made.
"The booming bewitchery and wildly open-hearted generosity of the poems in Wendy Lee Spacek's debut collection PSYCHOGYNECOLOGY are matched only by its ferocious willingness to see the self and other clearly, dismantling all appearances and swinging for the depths female and male, children and parents, poet and reader. In a time when poetry can seem indulgent on the one hand and deliberately meaningless on the other, these highly pressurized and electric lyrics are a shockingly affirmative breath of fresh air. PSYCHOGYNECOLOGY is without a doubt one of the most compelling books of poems I've read in a long time a reminder that poetry still has important work it can do, both in and of language. Cathartic and unflinching, unbridled and bold, these poems conjure what's broken and repair it for all of us, lighting our way to something better." Matt Hart
"Spacek's is a lyrical gift her attentiveness to the the natural world as it intersects with the speaker's trauma is sung. Each poem carries ominousness what is the fate of the child, the girls, the women when they've been so dimly named? Spacek explores questions like this through memory, visions, dreams, and myth to articulate a vast, confounding pain. We're pulled through beheaded rabbits, a child's abuse, a friend's abortion, through Dargeresque dream-scenes. The observations are clear and strange. Coupled with disjunctive, lyrically- charged narratives, they bespeak the complexity of femaleness, and molestation both physical and emotional. The shape Spacek's fury takes toward the objectification, degradation, and violation of the female body is arctic ice in these important poems that give new voice to an ancient, historical pain." Alessandra Lynch"
