Maps of Injury

by Chera Hammons

Maps of Injury tracks territory from the body to heredity, Southwestern country roads to horse-mottled pastures, and the kitchen sink to the well outside the house from which it is fed as these poems contemplate a woman's autonomy within her landscape. Here is a wife, daughter, and horsewoman coming to terms with chronic illness and the lingering effects of a previous abusive marriage. The injury mapped across this narrative inspires endearment for creatures bridled, companioned, or left by the roadside to die. Hammons shows us how love looks with every poetic line she worries into a body's history even after it's gone. A suffering horse is coaxed into its grave and there breathes its last before earth covers it. An unidentified body is found in a field where people come to examine and perhaps claim it as the speaker considers her own worth. It is a worth seemingly altered by an ill body which has been coarsely examined by doctors, by loved ones, by strangers, and in relation to the women in the speaker's past who dealt with terminal diseases. She who will remember her after she dies? How will her attachments be memorialized? Will future generations, at seeing how a body lies in a grave and what sickness still eats at the bones, know that she was wanted? Animals both wild and domestic alight and fade into these questions and the landscapes that consume them. Here the body's sovereignty is considered within the relationships that interpret it from the outside--relationships that the woman understands, in all of their imposition and dismissal, are also evidence that she has been loved.

Genres: Poetry

121 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2020

Reviews

[Karen Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cherish my signed copy and plan to purchase copies for friends. These are meaningful and memorable poems for anyone who enjoys writing that celebrates the living energies of plants and animals and landscapes but also digs deeply into the ways these energies intersect with themes of illness and home. I found new favorites in each section upon reread.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful book! I got this book through inter-Library loan, but may buy it. These are poems I will want to return to again and again.

some of my favorites:

Bounding Flight
Cross-section of an Oak
Evergreen
Pathologies
Accelerate
After Another, I Don't Think
Bridling
Bible Belt
The Long Definition
Morning Chores
The Onion as a Vessel of Memory
New Hay
Autocorrect

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of poetry that focuses on health, love, relationships, sickness, animals and nature.

from Amnesties: "I am trying again to learn how to live / with you, body. This skin is such a map of injury now. // So softly have you betrayed us / that the borders of discord bleed // into one each other, smudged riverbanks and muddied water. / You granted quarter to enemies, let them sleep // in our rooms and eat from the cast iron pans / we have spent our whole generation seasoning."

from Evergreen: "What we fear may not come to pass. Though the wind this years has been violent, / and the sky rainless, the tree we planted in front of our house // because we imagined some kind of life there, some green hope, / some shelter from the weather and the neighbors, may survive."

Overall a wonderful collection of poetry that you need in your library.