Once You Had Hands by Tasha Golden,Michael Wilson

The lives of ladies and ladies within the Bible Belt are usually shrouded in secrecy and restrained to the shadows. Now Tasha Golden’s choice of poetry, "Once You Had Hands," supplies voice to the silence surrounding problems with household violence and women’s subservience within the identify of religion.

“Tasha Golden's when you Had arms is a brilliant and relocating publication of poetry. there's a fierce voice the following that may make you're feeling threat with out continually naming it, and it really is certainly a perilous international that we meet right here. Golden has sharp senses and wit in depicting her sadness and fury at spiritual grants. there's pleasure right here too, difficult received, and quietly compelling.” – Jennifer Michael Hecht, writer of Who stated and Doubt: A History

“When ‘Christian’ attitudes, rituals, and abuses (physical and psychological) are a part of one's formative adventure of the richness of lifestyles itself, how does one extricate oneself from the perversion of this ‘religion’ but confirm the honour and terror of lifestyles? This ebook is a feral cry that invents the single shape which may include it; it’s a cry embodied in and ennobled through artwork, which doesn’t dilute yet complements its energy. i'm at a loss to explain, even from the skin, that strength. i will be able to basically urge you to learn it.”– James Cummins, writer of nonetheless a few Cake

“Wise, desperately unhappy, Tasha Golden’s poetry unearths a sinewy resilience in rhythm. Heartbeat-like, propulsive, the beat intensifies a traumatic surroundings during which soreness and damage are perversely sexualized and aestheticized. Golden’s perversions change into the opposite of self-indulgence. they're an ethic and a method she wields opposed to the grey meaninglessness of the matter of evil. family horrors are twisted into stunning sequined buildings that during their artifice, their passionate madeness, remind us that practical transformation is possible.”– Catherine Wagner, writer of worried Device

“Tasha Golden, ‘ankle deep in Jeremiah,’ has inebriated deeply of ‘God the author of items that Don’t Last,’ a God Who broods over rural Tennessee and makes its humans His personal. Golden is His anti-prophet, unacknowledged lady emanation of a patriarchal deity Who has despoiled too many generations of Southern girls. but this livid ebook can be a piece of sleek attractiveness. Interspersed with encouraged manipulations of poems by way of the metaphysical Henry Vaughan, and the evocative pictures of Michael Wilson, Golden’s paintings will stick with the reader for a protracted time.”– Norman Finkelstein, writer of tune; Professor of English

In beautiful language that's soft and uncooked, Golden attracts on her family’s Tennessee roots, in addition to the specified event of starting to be up in a conservative Christian tradition. The poems circulate the reader, occasionally to unhappiness and infrequently to anger, with the disappointments of faith and its damaged supplies. In “When they instructed me he was once knocking,” Golden writes approximately God now not as an all-powerful protector or a benevolent father yet as a presence that “hacked and carved himself the space/I hadn’t left him.” The desperation, and supreme unfulfillment, of believers is sharply published in “(For Our fight isn't opposed to Flesh and Blood),” within which Golden addresses the deity, “we’d lower you open, drain you dry/to drink that blood, shower in it, see if there’s any/power in it—that old wine/But you don’t have a heart.” The stark and minimalist black and white images of Michael Wilson fantastically underscores the book’s moods and heightens the feel of position created in its pages.

Golden’s poems bring up evocative questions about the character of faith and its domineering dating to people who keep on with it. The book’s ultimate poem, “Once You Had palms” keenly articulates the loss and aid felt in leaving faith: “I purely know/how lengthy I maintain dreaming, asking,/How lengthy, Lord?.../I soak my pillow, blouse, and wake/with one hand company opposed to my brow./It isn’t yours.” Her poignant kind will hang-out the reader lengthy after the e-book has been finished.