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Autobiography of a Wound: Poems
In ancient fertility carvings, artists would drill holes into the woman’s body to signify penetrability, which is the basis of Autobiography of a Wound: allowing those wounds and puncture marks to speak through the fertility figures. The wounds are chronicled through letters and poems addressed to F (F stands for the fertility carvings themselves, which are being addressed as one unified deity), and A (Aphrodite, who is being referenced as a general deity of womanhood, a figurine that reappears throughout the poems, and a symbol that is referenced or portrayed in almost every fertility figurine or carving). Autobiography of a Wound reconstructs the narrative surrounding female pathos and the idea of the hysteric girl.
88 pages, Paperback
First published September 4, 2018
About the author
Brynne Rebele-Henry
7 books134 followersBrynne Rebele-Henry was born in 1999. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Rookie, and Blackbird, among other places. Her writing has won numerous awards, including the 2015 Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has two books of poetry: Fleshgraphs and Autobiography of a Wound, which won the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and is a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Orpheus Girl is her first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 17, 2024
Update to original review May 2024:
I have done the impossible.
I reread this collection today, as I'm going through all my poetry books that I read a few years ago, and I remembered hating this one because of how repetitive it was. I remember saying that it felt like the same poem told over and over again, and so, to see if this was a fair comment, I decided to track the repetitive imagery throughout, page by page, poem by poem.
The images I could remember being repeated were 'stone', 'salt', 'bruise', and 'open mouth'. As it turns out, I should also have been tracking for 'scar', 'blood', 'bone', and instances of the poet eating weird shit.
Here are the findings.
Page 3 (poem 1)
Stone count - 1
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 1
Open mouth count - 0
Pages 4-5 (poem 2)
Stone count - 1
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 2
Open mouth count - 1
Page 6 (poem 3)
Stone count - 2
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 2
Open mouth count - 1
Page 7 (poem 4)
Stone count - 3
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 2
Open mouth count - 1
Pages 8-10 (poem 5)
Stone count - 6 (one of them is ‘body of pumice’, but I’m counting it)
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 2
Open mouth count - 1
Page 11 (poem 6)
Stone count - 6
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 2
Open mouth count - 1
Page 12 (poem 7)
Stone count - 6
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 2
Page 13 (poem 8)
Stone count - 7
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 3
Page 14 (poem 9)
Stone count - 7
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 4
Page 15 (poem 10)
Stone count - 7
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 4 (she does open her legs instead, though - there’s usually at least one body part being opened)
Page 16-20 (poem 11)
Stone count - 8
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 4 (she ‘closes her throat’, but I’m not counting it)
Also, at this point, I realise I should also be counting poems where ‘cum’ is a poetic motif, but I just can’t do that to myself on a Friday
Page 21 (poem 12)
Stone count - 9
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 4 (something ‘lines the inside of my mouth’ instead)
Page 22 (poem 13)
Stone count - 9
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 4
Page 23 (poem 14)
Stone count - 9
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 5
Page 24-26 (poem 15)
Stone count - 10
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 4
Open mouth count - 5
Page 27-28 (poem 17)
Stone count - 10
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 29 (poem 18)
Stone count - 10
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 30 (poem 19)
Stone count - 11 (obsidian, but I’m counting it)
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 31 (poem 20)
Stone count - 11
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 32 (poem 21)
Stone count - 12
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 33 (poem 22)
Stone count - 12
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 34 (poem 24)
Stone count - 13
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 35 (poem 25)
Stone count - 14
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Poem 36 (poem 26)
Stone count - 14
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
At this point, I also realise that she’s repeated ‘blood’, ‘bone’ and ‘scar’ in most poems, but I cannot be bothered to go back and recount these. This one has blood and bones in it. Double whammy.
Page 37 (poem 27)
Stone count - 15
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Again, at this point I realise that she hasn’t mentioned salt in a while, but in the last poem she said ‘we eat each other’ and ‘we eat earth’, in the poem before that it was ‘we eat icicles’, in the poem before that it was ‘we eat sticks of butter’, and in this one it’s ‘we ate snow mixed with syrup’. I reckon if I did a count for ‘eats weird shit’ instead, I’d be in the double digits by now.
Page 38 (poem 28)
Stone count - 15
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Triple whammy on the ‘blood’, ‘bone’ and ‘scar’ in this one. Bingo!
Page 39 (poem 29)
Stone count - 15
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Only ‘bone’ in this one. What was wrong with ‘blood’ and ‘scar’ this time around?
Page 40 (poem 30)
Stone count - 16
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Another tick in the ‘eats weird shit’ box, too - ‘we swallowed chlorine’.
Page 41 (poem 31)
Stone count - 16
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 6
Open mouth count - 5
Page 42-44 (poem 32)
Stone count - 16
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 7
Open mouth count - 5
We do have ‘bone’, ‘blood’ and ‘scar’, though. Old friends returned to us.
Page 45 (poem 33)
Stone count - 17
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 7
Open mouth count - 5
More eating weird shit - ‘we sucked the singe off our fingers’.
Page 46 (poem 34)
Stone count - 18 (this one is getting a bit ridiculous, now)
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 7
Open mouth count - 5
Yet more eating weird shit - ‘I remember the time I ate dirt’.
Page 47 (poem 35)
Stone count - 19
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 7
Open mouth count - 6
And yet more eating weird shit - ‘I ate a bowl of fish eggs then drank a bowl of wine mixed with blood and honey’. A tick in the ‘blood’ box, too.
Page 48 (poem 36)
Stone count - 19
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 6
Even more eating weird shit - ‘I learned how to drink only water mixed with vinegar’ and ‘I gorged myself on sugar’. God, I should have been counting these properly.
Page 49 (poem 37)
Stone count - 20
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 7
Can you believe it? More eating weird shit - ‘we ate oysters and compared the pumice of our bones’, and ‘she fed me slate shards’. More ‘bones’! Also, more ‘blood’!
Page 50 (poem 38)
Stone count - 21
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 7
I’m so weary. More eating weird shit - ‘they show us how to drink from broken bottles and how to eat butter off the stick’. Also, we have ‘scar’ and ‘blood’ again.
Page 51 (poem 39)
Stone count - 21
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 7
Page 52 (poem 40)
Stone count - 21
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 7
I’m suing. More eating weird shit - ‘I always had dirt in my mouth’, and ‘I learned how to swallow the earth’.
Page 53 (poem 41)
Stone count - 21
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 7
For reasons of my mental health, I have decided not to count ‘I swallow some girl’s cum’ as eating weird shit. That’s feminism.
Page 54 (poem 42)
Stone count - 22
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 8
Page 55 (poem 43)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 9
A double whammy, because the ‘stone’ in this one also counts as eating weird shit - ‘I swallowed three stones so that I would be fertile’. She does also eat mud in the next line, too. Plus, we have ‘blood’ and ‘bone’ again.
Page 56 (poem 44)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 9
Open mouth count - 10
Even more adventures in eating weird shit - ‘I am beginning to eat only sugar’.
Page 57 (poem 45)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 9
Open mouth count - 10
Just ‘blood’ in this one. Practically unique!
Page 58 (poem 46)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 9
Open mouth count - 10
We have ‘scar’, and more eating weird shit - ‘chewing up irises on her bed’.
Page 59-60 (poem 47)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 4
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 11
Unfathomably, even more eating weird shit - ‘I stopped eating sugar and started drinking salt mixed with tepid water’.
Page 61 (poem 48)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 4
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 11
I will not be counting ‘I just suck the cunt out of their fingers’ as eating weird shit. I could! But I won’t.
Page 62 (poem 49)
Stone count - 24
Salt count - 4
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 11
More eating weird shit - ‘if we again eat dirt’. You’re telling me, again. Also, we have ‘blood’.
Page 63 (poem 50)
Stone count - 25
Salt count - 4
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 11
We also have ‘scar’ in this one, of course.
Page 64 (poem 51)
Stone count - 26
Salt count - 4
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 12
Also ‘blood’.
Page 65 (poem 52)
Stone count - 27
Salt count - 5
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 13
After a brief interim, more eating weird shit - ‘I could swallow the ocean’s salt’. Also, ‘bones’.
Page 66 (poem 53)
Stone count - 27
Salt count - 5
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 13
We have ‘blood’ and ‘bones’ here, plus more eating weird shit - ‘I know why you swallowed only cancer pus’.
Page 67 (poem 54)
Stone count - 28
Salt count - 6
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 14
Even more eating weird shit in this one - ‘I would drink only peppermint oil’, ‘I would suck the pulp out of lemons until I became all salt’. Also, ‘blood’.
Page 68 (poem 55)
Stone count - 29
Salt count - 7
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 14
Charitably, I will not count ’we used to mix vinegar with salt water / gargle it to look for cuts inside our throats’ as eating weird shit, but I will point out that this is the fourth poem in a row where putting something weird in her mouth is the central image of the poem.
Page 69 (poem 56)
Stone count - 29
Salt count - 7
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 14
Same as above; not technically eating weird shit, but ‘I could swallow until there was nothing left’ appears here. Also, ‘blood’ and ‘scar’.
Page 70 (poem 59)
Stone count - 30
Salt count - 7
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 14
Page 71 (poem 60)
Stone count - 31
Salt count - 7
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 14
More eating weird shit - ‘one day I will swallow the sun’. Also, ‘bones’.
Page 72 (poem 61)
Stone count - 32
Salt count - 8
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 15
To finish, we have ‘scars’ and ‘bones’, and a final instance of eating weird shit - ‘one day we will open our mouths to the sky and swallow’.
In summary, the editing of this collection is terrible, and this entire book could literally have been 5 poems. I'm genuinely annoyed by it. A few repeated motifs is fine, but they're not even used differently here. This book shouldn't have been published in this state. Looking at the reviews for Rebele-Henry's newest collection, she's still doing the same thing, and I find it genuinely frustrating that she's not being edited properly. You can't charge people $20 for a book with 61 poems in it, where only about 4 of them don't use the exact same imagery as all the rest.
For similar poetry, read Rachel McKibbens or Brenna Twohy. They both have the benefit of a vocabulary which extends past 'I ate stone / until my scars bled / and I became a hole / nothing but a ribcage / with an open mouth / I fucked a girl / into her bones / and ate dirt / from her salt.' That's not an actual Rebele-Henry poem, but it could be. Now pay me $20.
---------
Original review, May 2022
Firstly, this whole collection is a genuinely impressive achievement. The fact that Rebele-Henry wrote this when she was 16/17 is astonishing. The idea of the collection - poetic responses to ancient fertility figures - is borderline genius, and some of her imagery is really excellent:
girls' bodies are always seen as fields
something to be maimed, something to be plowed,
so I let my body be landscaped into something not mine
That's good! That's a striking image! It connotes fertility, which is one of the key themes in this collection, but also a wild thing being made tame. The policing of women's fertility by men. The feral nature of a woman's body and the need to break the power in them. I dog-eared almost half the pages in the first quarter of this book because there were so many great lines.
And this:
The evidence points to: a stranger, a serial, a small man
who everyone says
is gentle
Yes!! That's the stuff!! A commentary on how we can map the pattern of men who perpetrate violence against women, as well as how those men are described in popular culture, and how often that pattern is either 'he's an unbridled monster and therefore no-one could have stopped him' or 'he was always lovely to everyone before this, so we couldn't have known.' It's an insightful observation and the alliteration makes it memorable.
The problem with this book is that it's just the same poem 70 times over. I am not exaggerating. If you were to do a search on the Kindle edition for the words salt, blood, basalt, stone, wound, sugar, he said, she said, you would get hundreds of results each. Just about every poem contains all of those words, or at least two thirds of them. The imagery doesn't change from poem to poem. The syntax is identical - a lot of 'she said [very profound thing involving stone] and so I [did something involving blood.]' It's just dozens of poems about having a lot of self-destructive sex and feeling sad about it, in which the body is compared to a hole and her hipbones are very sharp and she has bruises and she tastes like either blood or honey, or sugar or salt, and that's about it. Sometimes, we get a poem about general violence against women instead, but even then, the imagery doesn't change. It just gets applied to girls in general instead of the narrator and her lovers.
It just feels like Rebele-Henry had some really great imagery and then wrote the same poem over and over until that imagery was spent, and then published it. And hey, that's fine if you're publishing individual poems in an anthology, but as a cohesive collection, it just makes the whole thing fall completely flat. I stopped feeling anything after the sixth poem in which the narrator wanted to become stone* or ate dirt or met a girl who only ate sugar. It was so repetitive that I found myself inadvertently playing a sort of word Bingo. I adored the first quarter of this book because all the beautiful words were new. After that, they became completely meaningless.
I feel like there was a gem of a pamphlet in here - maybe 10 or so poems - but it doesn't work as a longer collection at all. I wish Rebele-Henry had picked a handful of figures to respond to and been more careful not to write the same poem for each of them. I want so much to read a collection of hers in a few years' time; some of her language and imagery is so strong that I just want to read some poems where she doesn't rely on the crutch of the same 4 lines to hold up her poetry. Until then, this one is a miss for me.
*I picked this image randomly because I remember it being prominent, and when I was searching for examples, I turned to three random pages and found it on page 24, page 32 and again on page 34: 'I want a body made of stone', 'I decided to become stone', 'I let her turn my body into basalt' respectively. I decided to flick through the next few pages and see how many more times it turned up. On page 37, we get 'I became something other than pure stone.' On page 40, it's 'I have let my body turn to something other than stone.' On page 45, just for a break, we get 'your father is a man turned to stone.' I stopped searching after that. When you have the same image in 6 out of 17 poems and the image isn't saying anything new, you have a problem. It's fine to use repetition if that repetition is deliberate, but here it just felt like a real oversight.
I have done the impossible.
I reread this collection today, as I'm going through all my poetry books that I read a few years ago, and I remembered hating this one because of how repetitive it was. I remember saying that it felt like the same poem told over and over again, and so, to see if this was a fair comment, I decided to track the repetitive imagery throughout, page by page, poem by poem.
The images I could remember being repeated were 'stone', 'salt', 'bruise', and 'open mouth'. As it turns out, I should also have been tracking for 'scar', 'blood', 'bone', and instances of the poet eating weird shit.
Here are the findings.
Page 3 (poem 1)
Stone count - 1
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 1
Open mouth count - 0
Pages 4-5 (poem 2)
Stone count - 1
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 2
Open mouth count - 1
Page 6 (poem 3)
Stone count - 2
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 2
Open mouth count - 1
Page 7 (poem 4)
Stone count - 3
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 2
Open mouth count - 1
Pages 8-10 (poem 5)
Stone count - 6 (one of them is ‘body of pumice’, but I’m counting it)
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 2
Open mouth count - 1
Page 11 (poem 6)
Stone count - 6
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 2
Open mouth count - 1
Page 12 (poem 7)
Stone count - 6
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 2
Page 13 (poem 8)
Stone count - 7
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 3
Page 14 (poem 9)
Stone count - 7
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 4
Page 15 (poem 10)
Stone count - 7
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 4 (she does open her legs instead, though - there’s usually at least one body part being opened)
Page 16-20 (poem 11)
Stone count - 8
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 4 (she ‘closes her throat’, but I’m not counting it)
Also, at this point, I realise I should also be counting poems where ‘cum’ is a poetic motif, but I just can’t do that to myself on a Friday
Page 21 (poem 12)
Stone count - 9
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 4 (something ‘lines the inside of my mouth’ instead)
Page 22 (poem 13)
Stone count - 9
Salt count - 1
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 4
Page 23 (poem 14)
Stone count - 9
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 3
Open mouth count - 5
Page 24-26 (poem 15)
Stone count - 10
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 4
Open mouth count - 5
Page 27-28 (poem 17)
Stone count - 10
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 29 (poem 18)
Stone count - 10
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 30 (poem 19)
Stone count - 11 (obsidian, but I’m counting it)
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 31 (poem 20)
Stone count - 11
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 32 (poem 21)
Stone count - 12
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 33 (poem 22)
Stone count - 12
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 34 (poem 24)
Stone count - 13
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Page 35 (poem 25)
Stone count - 14
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Poem 36 (poem 26)
Stone count - 14
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
At this point, I also realise that she’s repeated ‘blood’, ‘bone’ and ‘scar’ in most poems, but I cannot be bothered to go back and recount these. This one has blood and bones in it. Double whammy.
Page 37 (poem 27)
Stone count - 15
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Again, at this point I realise that she hasn’t mentioned salt in a while, but in the last poem she said ‘we eat each other’ and ‘we eat earth’, in the poem before that it was ‘we eat icicles’, in the poem before that it was ‘we eat sticks of butter’, and in this one it’s ‘we ate snow mixed with syrup’. I reckon if I did a count for ‘eats weird shit’ instead, I’d be in the double digits by now.
Page 38 (poem 28)
Stone count - 15
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Triple whammy on the ‘blood’, ‘bone’ and ‘scar’ in this one. Bingo!
Page 39 (poem 29)
Stone count - 15
Salt count - 2
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Only ‘bone’ in this one. What was wrong with ‘blood’ and ‘scar’ this time around?
Page 40 (poem 30)
Stone count - 16
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 5
Open mouth count - 5
Another tick in the ‘eats weird shit’ box, too - ‘we swallowed chlorine’.
Page 41 (poem 31)
Stone count - 16
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 6
Open mouth count - 5
Page 42-44 (poem 32)
Stone count - 16
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 7
Open mouth count - 5
We do have ‘bone’, ‘blood’ and ‘scar’, though. Old friends returned to us.
Page 45 (poem 33)
Stone count - 17
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 7
Open mouth count - 5
More eating weird shit - ‘we sucked the singe off our fingers’.
Page 46 (poem 34)
Stone count - 18 (this one is getting a bit ridiculous, now)
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 7
Open mouth count - 5
Yet more eating weird shit - ‘I remember the time I ate dirt’.
Page 47 (poem 35)
Stone count - 19
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 7
Open mouth count - 6
And yet more eating weird shit - ‘I ate a bowl of fish eggs then drank a bowl of wine mixed with blood and honey’. A tick in the ‘blood’ box, too.
Page 48 (poem 36)
Stone count - 19
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 6
Even more eating weird shit - ‘I learned how to drink only water mixed with vinegar’ and ‘I gorged myself on sugar’. God, I should have been counting these properly.
Page 49 (poem 37)
Stone count - 20
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 7
Can you believe it? More eating weird shit - ‘we ate oysters and compared the pumice of our bones’, and ‘she fed me slate shards’. More ‘bones’! Also, more ‘blood’!
Page 50 (poem 38)
Stone count - 21
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 7
I’m so weary. More eating weird shit - ‘they show us how to drink from broken bottles and how to eat butter off the stick’. Also, we have ‘scar’ and ‘blood’ again.
Page 51 (poem 39)
Stone count - 21
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 7
Page 52 (poem 40)
Stone count - 21
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 7
I’m suing. More eating weird shit - ‘I always had dirt in my mouth’, and ‘I learned how to swallow the earth’.
Page 53 (poem 41)
Stone count - 21
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 7
For reasons of my mental health, I have decided not to count ‘I swallow some girl’s cum’ as eating weird shit. That’s feminism.
Page 54 (poem 42)
Stone count - 22
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 8
Page 55 (poem 43)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 8
Open mouth count - 9
A double whammy, because the ‘stone’ in this one also counts as eating weird shit - ‘I swallowed three stones so that I would be fertile’. She does also eat mud in the next line, too. Plus, we have ‘blood’ and ‘bone’ again.
Page 56 (poem 44)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 9
Open mouth count - 10
Even more adventures in eating weird shit - ‘I am beginning to eat only sugar’.
Page 57 (poem 45)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 9
Open mouth count - 10
Just ‘blood’ in this one. Practically unique!
Page 58 (poem 46)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 3
Bruise count - 9
Open mouth count - 10
We have ‘scar’, and more eating weird shit - ‘chewing up irises on her bed’.
Page 59-60 (poem 47)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 4
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 11
Unfathomably, even more eating weird shit - ‘I stopped eating sugar and started drinking salt mixed with tepid water’.
Page 61 (poem 48)
Stone count - 23
Salt count - 4
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 11
I will not be counting ‘I just suck the cunt out of their fingers’ as eating weird shit. I could! But I won’t.
Page 62 (poem 49)
Stone count - 24
Salt count - 4
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 11
More eating weird shit - ‘if we again eat dirt’. You’re telling me, again. Also, we have ‘blood’.
Page 63 (poem 50)
Stone count - 25
Salt count - 4
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 11
We also have ‘scar’ in this one, of course.
Page 64 (poem 51)
Stone count - 26
Salt count - 4
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 12
Also ‘blood’.
Page 65 (poem 52)
Stone count - 27
Salt count - 5
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 13
After a brief interim, more eating weird shit - ‘I could swallow the ocean’s salt’. Also, ‘bones’.
Page 66 (poem 53)
Stone count - 27
Salt count - 5
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 13
We have ‘blood’ and ‘bones’ here, plus more eating weird shit - ‘I know why you swallowed only cancer pus’.
Page 67 (poem 54)
Stone count - 28
Salt count - 6
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 14
Even more eating weird shit in this one - ‘I would drink only peppermint oil’, ‘I would suck the pulp out of lemons until I became all salt’. Also, ‘blood’.
Page 68 (poem 55)
Stone count - 29
Salt count - 7
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 14
Charitably, I will not count ’we used to mix vinegar with salt water / gargle it to look for cuts inside our throats’ as eating weird shit, but I will point out that this is the fourth poem in a row where putting something weird in her mouth is the central image of the poem.
Page 69 (poem 56)
Stone count - 29
Salt count - 7
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 14
Same as above; not technically eating weird shit, but ‘I could swallow until there was nothing left’ appears here. Also, ‘blood’ and ‘scar’.
Page 70 (poem 59)
Stone count - 30
Salt count - 7
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 14
Page 71 (poem 60)
Stone count - 31
Salt count - 7
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 14
More eating weird shit - ‘one day I will swallow the sun’. Also, ‘bones’.
Page 72 (poem 61)
Stone count - 32
Salt count - 8
Bruise count - 10
Open mouth count - 15
To finish, we have ‘scars’ and ‘bones’, and a final instance of eating weird shit - ‘one day we will open our mouths to the sky and swallow’.
In summary, the editing of this collection is terrible, and this entire book could literally have been 5 poems. I'm genuinely annoyed by it. A few repeated motifs is fine, but they're not even used differently here. This book shouldn't have been published in this state. Looking at the reviews for Rebele-Henry's newest collection, she's still doing the same thing, and I find it genuinely frustrating that she's not being edited properly. You can't charge people $20 for a book with 61 poems in it, where only about 4 of them don't use the exact same imagery as all the rest.
For similar poetry, read Rachel McKibbens or Brenna Twohy. They both have the benefit of a vocabulary which extends past 'I ate stone / until my scars bled / and I became a hole / nothing but a ribcage / with an open mouth / I fucked a girl / into her bones / and ate dirt / from her salt.' That's not an actual Rebele-Henry poem, but it could be. Now pay me $20.
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Original review, May 2022
Firstly, this whole collection is a genuinely impressive achievement. The fact that Rebele-Henry wrote this when she was 16/17 is astonishing. The idea of the collection - poetic responses to ancient fertility figures - is borderline genius, and some of her imagery is really excellent:
girls' bodies are always seen as fields
something to be maimed, something to be plowed,
so I let my body be landscaped into something not mine
That's good! That's a striking image! It connotes fertility, which is one of the key themes in this collection, but also a wild thing being made tame. The policing of women's fertility by men. The feral nature of a woman's body and the need to break the power in them. I dog-eared almost half the pages in the first quarter of this book because there were so many great lines.
And this:
The evidence points to: a stranger, a serial, a small man
who everyone says
is gentle
Yes!! That's the stuff!! A commentary on how we can map the pattern of men who perpetrate violence against women, as well as how those men are described in popular culture, and how often that pattern is either 'he's an unbridled monster and therefore no-one could have stopped him' or 'he was always lovely to everyone before this, so we couldn't have known.' It's an insightful observation and the alliteration makes it memorable.
The problem with this book is that it's just the same poem 70 times over. I am not exaggerating. If you were to do a search on the Kindle edition for the words salt, blood, basalt, stone, wound, sugar, he said, she said, you would get hundreds of results each. Just about every poem contains all of those words, or at least two thirds of them. The imagery doesn't change from poem to poem. The syntax is identical - a lot of 'she said [very profound thing involving stone] and so I [did something involving blood.]' It's just dozens of poems about having a lot of self-destructive sex and feeling sad about it, in which the body is compared to a hole and her hipbones are very sharp and she has bruises and she tastes like either blood or honey, or sugar or salt, and that's about it. Sometimes, we get a poem about general violence against women instead, but even then, the imagery doesn't change. It just gets applied to girls in general instead of the narrator and her lovers.
It just feels like Rebele-Henry had some really great imagery and then wrote the same poem over and over until that imagery was spent, and then published it. And hey, that's fine if you're publishing individual poems in an anthology, but as a cohesive collection, it just makes the whole thing fall completely flat. I stopped feeling anything after the sixth poem in which the narrator wanted to become stone* or ate dirt or met a girl who only ate sugar. It was so repetitive that I found myself inadvertently playing a sort of word Bingo. I adored the first quarter of this book because all the beautiful words were new. After that, they became completely meaningless.
I feel like there was a gem of a pamphlet in here - maybe 10 or so poems - but it doesn't work as a longer collection at all. I wish Rebele-Henry had picked a handful of figures to respond to and been more careful not to write the same poem for each of them. I want so much to read a collection of hers in a few years' time; some of her language and imagery is so strong that I just want to read some poems where she doesn't rely on the crutch of the same 4 lines to hold up her poetry. Until then, this one is a miss for me.
*I picked this image randomly because I remember it being prominent, and when I was searching for examples, I turned to three random pages and found it on page 24, page 32 and again on page 34: 'I want a body made of stone', 'I decided to become stone', 'I let her turn my body into basalt' respectively. I decided to flick through the next few pages and see how many more times it turned up. On page 37, we get 'I became something other than pure stone.' On page 40, it's 'I have let my body turn to something other than stone.' On page 45, just for a break, we get 'your father is a man turned to stone.' I stopped searching after that. When you have the same image in 6 out of 17 poems and the image isn't saying anything new, you have a problem. It's fine to use repetition if that repetition is deliberate, but here it just felt like a real oversight.
January 30, 2021
I was... not here for this. Reading the end of the book, these poems were never intended to be collected and read together, which makes quite a lot of sense considering that they're all Exactly The Same. I didn't get it.
February 26, 2023
Unfortunately incredibly repetitious on theme, topic, emotion, word choice, and even exact phrases. Some of the individual poems could be ok by themselves, but once you've read one of the poems you have essentially read the entire book.
June 23, 2025
More realistic rating: 3.6 stars!
I would say that "Autobiography of a Wound" is a lot more cohesive and better of a collection than Rebele-Henry's other collection, "Prelude." The poems included in this collection mention themes of religious trauma, eating disorders, menstruation, and the connection between fertility figures and women in real life. The connection between fertility figures and women in real life is the overarching theme of the collection and I think Rebele-Henry does a fine job of keeping up with the theme and broadening on the concept. Personally, my favorite part of this collection is how it touches on girlhood and how it can be gruesome and not at all pretty.
I think the biggest weakness of Rebele-Henry's work in general is her tendency to be very repetitive and tiresome when it comes to certain words and metaphors. She mentions "blood" and "stone" so many times in this collection that I sort of grew tired of it towards the end. I understand that repeating words ties a narrative together but there's also nothing wrong with saying things in different ways and exploring new experiences and memories.
I would say that "Autobiography of a Wound" is a lot more cohesive and better of a collection than Rebele-Henry's other collection, "Prelude." The poems included in this collection mention themes of religious trauma, eating disorders, menstruation, and the connection between fertility figures and women in real life. The connection between fertility figures and women in real life is the overarching theme of the collection and I think Rebele-Henry does a fine job of keeping up with the theme and broadening on the concept. Personally, my favorite part of this collection is how it touches on girlhood and how it can be gruesome and not at all pretty.
I think the biggest weakness of Rebele-Henry's work in general is her tendency to be very repetitive and tiresome when it comes to certain words and metaphors. She mentions "blood" and "stone" so many times in this collection that I sort of grew tired of it towards the end. I understand that repeating words ties a narrative together but there's also nothing wrong with saying things in different ways and exploring new experiences and memories.
April 22, 2025
There are so many recurring images and motifs between these poems that it becomes really interesting to read them together — to see how the images compound and morph, to see how they build into a larger picture (THE autobiography of a wound, which may in fact be several wounds festering into one).
Having said that, the poems wind up feeling a little too repetitive after a while. Independently they’re no less interesting than the others, but the collection as a whole catches a bit of redundancy by the end.
Having said that, the poems wind up feeling a little too repetitive after a while. Independently they’re no less interesting than the others, but the collection as a whole catches a bit of redundancy by the end.
April 11, 2019
The language of this poetry is graphic and painful. It's breathtaking how well the words used give a tone of anguish. I really liked this, some of the poems got to graphic for me, but that's a personal preference. I would recommend this to someone going through a breakup. I'm not an expert on triggers, but there's some poems that mention eating disorders, and some of the poems seem like the sex wasn't consensual, so be wary if that can cause terrible things to happen in your brain.
April 30, 2019
Some poetry is meant to be spoken out loud, to be heard, to be shared. Some poetry is absorbed by your body, to be viscerally felt. This is the latter. So many trigger warnings, that I’m sure I’m forgetting some: physical abuse, sexual abuse, self harm, alcohol, drugs, eating disorders, suicide, and more.
June 28, 2019
THIS WAS AMAZINg!!!!!!!!! i love all the descriptions and metaphors. one of the best poems i've read. way better than the ones we did for gcse. way better than carol-ann duffs work. not huge fan of her. but this was so gooooooooood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i loved it
June 5, 2019
What a visceral, astonishingly good collection!
August 9, 2023
Amiturish and underdeveloped. Felt like shock value pandering.
Not impressed.
Not impressed.
January 31, 2025
I think there was some of it that I liked but I just didn’t relate to the poems as much; this is a different girl than me, I liked it
April 25, 2025
Repetitive and navel gazey without a fresh enough construction to justify it
May 3, 2026
Brutal
January 3, 2023
‘Portrait as yourself’
As a child your brain fires random synapses and you almost die several times.
You don’t sleep because you think you will die again, your heart is a broken animal. Years later you will be sad and then not.
You will draw flowers on your skin. You will become something.
As a child your brain fires random synapses and you almost die several times.
You don’t sleep because you think you will die again, your heart is a broken animal. Years later you will be sad and then not.
You will draw flowers on your skin. You will become something.
November 12, 2018
❤️❤️❤️❤️
Read
March 9, 2019“What do you call it when girls keep dying, what do you call it when your body is / a zeppelin? How do you become something other than wounds?”
—from “Self-portrait as a broken Venus statuette”
—from “Self-portrait as a broken Venus statuette”
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