Übermütter’s Death Dance by Laura Hinton

Übermütter’s Death Dance is a mixed-genre poetry series recounting a mother’s experience of an adult child’s death. Beginning with reportorial poet’s prose, the book dissolves into a series of lyric pieces that incorporate song fragments and scripted movement into written text. Memoir-like surreal prose tales lace together multiple modalities of poetry into a script that creates and re-creates the “Übermütter”—a pluralized figure—into repeating but evolving reconstructions of grieving “selves.” These are performance “selves” that appear and reappear, as reflected in the disembodied sightings that also distill this book’s deeper exploration of matter through 3-D figuration. Interweaving multicultural historical-spiritual texts with literary and psychological accounts of death and dying, this hybrid poetry work provides space for words that mirror the grieving body, for a body that mirrors back the spatially moving text.

“There is no way to make sense of a senseless death, but in Übermütter’s Death Dance, Laura Hinton engages the senses to stay alive and to find, if not meaning, then some sort of vital force in the midst of tragedy. Hinton’s heterogeneous yet unified collection combines the rhetoric of documentation and daily life with the lyricism of dreams, visions and ritual. The result is profound, moving and mercurial.”

—Joanna Fuhrman, author of The Year of Yellow Butterflies

“How do we survive grief—let alone write it? Shattered by the inexplicable death of her only child at 32, Laura Hinton miraculously gives us this lacerating work of witness. “am I still a mother?” she asks, refusing any answer. Her voice is at once desperate and wise, knowing that no one wants to live in these pages: “I / breathe on you / my Death / contagion,” she quips—“I am un-home / d.” And because in grief “time does not exist,” sequence reverses, halts, disappears: “no future tense in morning time,” “there is no ‘after.’” In the shifting landscapes and timescapes of Hinton’s work, memory and dream, lived and imagined experience, coalesce in the dissociation anyone who has mourned will recognize. I feel privileged to read—to be—in these words.”

—Elisabeth Frost, author of The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry

“Laura Hinton’s heartbreakingly beautiful elegy to her son Paul, Übermütter’s Death Dance, is a thrilling choreography of lyric, memoir, dance, spirituality and theory. In this book, Hinton assembles a profound reflection about motherhood, death and love. Indeed, the reader dances throughout this mother’s life and death dance, leaping and soaring from one gorgeously written section to the next.”

—Karen Brennan, author of little dark

Laura Hinton is a multi-media poet, scholar, editor and literary critic based in New York City. Her scholarly books include The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (SUNY Press), and two edited collections on women’s poetics: Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and the Feminist Superhero: Voice, Vision, Politics, and Performance in U.S. Contemporary Women’s Poetics (Lexington Books) and We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics (co-editor with Cynthia Hogue, University of Alabama Press). She has published a poetry book, Sisyphus My Love (To Record a Dream in a Bathtub) (BlazeVox Books), and many independent hybrid poetry pieces including photography and/or video in journals like Yew, Madhatter Review, Feminist Studies, and Poetryseen. She publishes critical essays on literature and film in journals like Textual Practice and Jacket 2, and has also published creative non-fiction essays, most recently in The Intima. She is the editor of a performance chapbook series under the imprint of Mermaid Tenement Press, and has kept a literary blog of essays on hybrid poetics since 2009, entitled, Chant de la Sirene. Laura Hinton is a Professor of English at the City College of New York (CUNY), where she teaches women’s literature, contemporary poetics, visual studies and feminist theory. Her website is located at www.laurahinton-singingsirens.com.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 124 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-241-9

$16

Übermütter's Death Danc… by Geoffrey Gatza