1963. A young widow with two little girls marries a bereaved man, also with two daughters, and together they have a child—a fifth daughter. In A Woman Talks to Her Tongue, the fifth daughter, Alison,  speaks of that family, as she knew it, its secrets and silences, unacknowledged griefs and inherited traumas, how they shaped her, how she survived them and grew, through poetry, into acceptance and gratitude for the life she made of all this ordinary tragedy and comedy. Poems keep a poet’s secrets and curate her memories as if they were our own; through the ways a poet employs language (sprung, taut, elliptical, rhythmic, metaphored) to care for, and keep safe, the only life she gets to lead, poetry somehow—this is its magic—tells us, its readers, our secrets, myths that might almost be our own. And so it goes with this first book by Alison Gorman. A bestiary of the many species—some holy, some poisonous—of silence.

The early poems of A Woman Talks to Her Tongue catch and release a few moments in a daughter’s life, from her early childhood to parenthood. The second section is a kind and passionate cry for truth-telling, femininity and creativity; it includes a series of remarkable monologues that examine silence and breaking silence in the voices of some women from history: Enheduanna (a Sumerian priestess and the first recorded poet), the goddess Venus, a vestal virgin, Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo and Zelda Fitzgerald. In the poems of part three—along with the collection’s opening poem “Telling Will”—the poet leads us deftly and kindly through painful discoveries and the loneliness of estrangement, toward her reconnection with ageing parents, and her ongoing battle to forgive. That quest—toward understanding and acceptance—continues through the epiphanies, the moments of world and marriage, the coming of middle age, the delights, that comprise the book’s fourth part. This is a book of women and tongues, a book of many forms, of eloquence and quiet rage; a book of small ecstasies, long sorrows and longer loves. A triumphant first collection. A lyric and fragmentary record of a life that learns to transfigure silence to song and sorrow to beauty.