Things I Didn't Do with This Body
Amanda Gunn spends one of six sections of Things I Didn’t Do with This Body addressing Harriet Tubman: “The price you paid for having no choice. The price / of the railroad with a flesh-made train.” “Mystic” and related poems track the price of death and survival through Tubman’s name, face, and memory. The section moves between this century’s absurd plan to put her likeness on U.S. currency and the childhood head injury that pained the abolitionist for the rest of her life. These assured poems do not read like a debut, as the collection expertly gathers ideas, objects, and affects of one body to converge histories and agonies, just as Tubman leads a group at Combahee “moving as one black body against the wind.”
The author curiously analyzes the emotional remittances exacted on an individual within a family or a system. “A girl among boys is most always alone,” says the speaker in “Girl,” while “Hystersisters” recalls a last night in a rehab center, when laughter “erupted from our guts / like activated charcoal.” The plural first person suggests solidarity in refusing suppression. A father speaks through silences in “[t]he year he desegregated / the university” and in refusing to share details around his brother’s death (“My mother told me / these things”), but has lavish words for his daughter: “He says ‘purdy,’…I hope / I am never pretty.”
Lovers and medications and language all offer momentary forms of connection, as in the exceptional poem “Things I Didn’t Do with This Body & Things I Did,” which has two listing stanzas corresponding to the title’s bifurcation. First, the didn’ts consider what would it mean to “bear a child with it,” “march it in Baltimore for a killed Black man,” or touch the earth’s natural corners; then, the dids remember the risks undertaken by—and marks made on—the body, before ending with an acknowledgement of the body as itself something with which the speaker can commune: “on the rare, keen nights it stayed with me, I bore its bright fragrant solitary intolerable pleasure.”