Chamber After Chamber

Saara Myrene Raappana (Author)

9781625347787

Paperback / softback, published 1 April 2024

66 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.272 kg

“With invigorating strength and song, this gorgeous first book shows us that we are animals—hungry, driven, crafty, tender, and violent, we surprise ourselves. Saara Myrene Raappanna transmits to readers the textures of land, lake, and sky: ‘A blizzard switched the ground / for clouds and made the county blind,’ begins ‘Elegy with Lake Effect.’ Chamber after Chamber is alive with thunder, stinging insects, mud, animal blood, and human sweat; the electric influence of Lake Superior is felt throughout. This cunning, graceful speaker elucidates one of life’s most dazzling contradictions: that the heart—'the part that never sleeps’—is at once spirit and flesh, ‘light’ and ‘meat’.”—Emily Hunt, author of Company

Chamber after Chamber is about what fractures, fixes, and refills the hearts of two girls as they grow into women. A loose narrative in three sections, the poems follow a speaker and her cousin through their hardscrabble, backwoods childhood to their separation—both physical and emotional—as adults. From the make-believe apocalypses and cut-and-paste valentines of elementary school to the stadium-seating classrooms and multiplexes of southern China, our speaker tries to leave the shame and dysfunction of her family behind. In China, she begins to see America—and herself—clearly for the first time, and in doing so discovers that both her cousin and her country are inextricably woven into

[her body] part that never sleeps the blood
and chambered meat that’s like a rock squeezed
in a fist rapping its knuckles
on the sweet door of the body.