At dawn the bugs died down and the birds started upThe dog stared at a photograph of a forest like it was a windowWillows along the canal were smothered in something cotton candy–esqueA dense tangle of orbs and cobs and sheetsBeings decomposed and became other beingsAt dusk the bugs started up and the birds died downCreamy pudding, someone wrote, regarding knowledgeMown clover augmented redundant smellsPeople in movies confused her, they always had something to sayA figure’s hand was still encased in the marble blockA scheme always failed if you watched it being hatchedThe formula made drama a foregone conclusionThe specialist put sharp metal into daughter’s armThe specialist put soft plastic down her throatThe specialist put piezoelectric crystals onto her wristsThe specialist put her head in a sound like a propellerFalling out of the sky and into a municipal swimming poolNot otherwise specified, said the specialistA person wearing gloves kept saying attachmentPorous daughter, who couldn’t domesticate her noticingThey would take her from me and put her in a homeShe would lie on ironed sheets until she had no personalityLike that woman who couldn’t pour a cup of teaBecause it was frozen, like a glacierThe dominant metaphor for the body was the engineThe dominant metaphor for the city was the bodyThe dominant metaphor for identity was consumptionSometimes a brain got too big, holes had to be drilledTo make room, I committed the first page of the economics textbook to memoryPeople always want more, no matter how much they have already
Vexations (excerpt)
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- March 28, 2023
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Reprinted with permission from Vexations by Annelyse Gelman, published by the University of Chicago Press.
© 2023 by The University of Chicago.
All rights reserved.
Annelyse Gelman’s new book-length poem Vexations, awarded the 2022 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is available now from the University of Chicago Press. Her work has previously appeared in The New Yorker, BOMB, The Iowa Review, the PEN Poetry Series, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and she is the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (2014, Write Bloody), the artist’s book POOL (2020, NECK), and the EP About Repulsion (2019, Fonograf Editions). She also directs Midst (midst.press), an experimental platform for archiving and sharing the writing process. Find her at www.annelysegelman.com.
Chicago, Illinois
University of Chicago
"Gelman’s Vexations moves in organized disjunction through a winding narrative that insists and compels."
— Harriet Books
“Vexations is a brilliant, dizzying, necessarily unnerving take on the project of the state and the varied estrangements on which it feeds. Demanding and speculative, Gelman’s book-length poem names the absurd conditions out of which we (readers), and the text itself, emerge, awakening a rage. The world Gelman creates is a strange, slant rendering of our own, delivering shock after shock of recognition in our reading of its intimacies—clarity, threat, pleasure, dread. Part mother’s account of her life with her young daughter, part encounter with Erik Satie’s nineteenth-century score of the same name, Vexations is a poem, a performance, and a score of endurance. It is a book radiant and terrifying with our time. It is afire.”
— Aracelis Girmay and Solmaz Sharif, James Laughlin Award judges' statement
"This experimental book-length poem traces a mother and daughter’s travels through a surreal landscape on the verge of ecological and social collapse."
— Publishers Weekly
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