Guernica Editions

Hers is the story of a woman undone, who has willingly offered herself, abdicated utterly and been utterly defeated, as perhaps all women have dreamed of doing. It is a story as old as the world and yet brand-new. Though out of her depth, even out of her mind, she has been able to hold onto her language, to regain its use. Once the man is gone, the eternal now of his caresses at last enters the past. End, deafness, and let speech arise. Gathering together the scatterings, mending body parts and parts of speech, the woman apostrophizes that “foreign body” who, she says, opened her up like a book. For no reason, she says, or just to see what would be left without her head.

Write, whores! Write, mothers! Write, you victims of rape! Write, the pilferers and the pilfered! Let words fill up the spaces of women's ancestral silence, of women's cosmic silence. Catherine Lalonde's driven, drunken poetic utterance lends a voice to dark realms that have been wordless since time immemorial.