Thunderhead

Emily Rose Cole is a writer and lyricist from Pennsylvania. She is the author of Love & a Loaded Gun, a chapbook of persona poems from Minerva Rising Press. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Poet Lore, and the Los Angeles Review, among others.

Acknowledgments Self-Portrait as Judy Garland Part One Spell for the Fissured Brain Double Memory with Train Imagined Snapshot: Morningstar Studios, 1988 Lent Self-Portrait as Rapunzel Lovebites Prayer In the Year of the Divorce, My Fascinations Include: Surrealism, the Dust Bowl and The Wizard of Oz Protection Spell Somewhere Brighter Meditation with Infinity Four Poisons Premonition Part Two Spell for Courage Self-Portrait as Persephone Returning Passport Another Premonition Portrait: Mama as Demeter Her Cancer into Harvest Still Life with Lines From Isaiah Snapdragons (I) After the Transplant Fails, I Dream of Crocodiles Hospice All I Wanted Nocturne with Witch & Desire MRI, Barnes Jewish Hospital Part Three Spell for the Grief Song Scarred to Your Throat At Her Funeral, Singing What Makes a Pearl Elegy with Hemlock & Cold Tea Self-Portrait as Dorothy Gale Love Poem to Risk In Toulouse (I) MS Nocturne Without a Magician At Cimetere de Terre Cabade Snapdragons (II) The Night Before My Diagnosis Is Confirmed In Toulouse (II) How Not to Remember Your Mother MS Nocturne with Fuse, Crosshairs and Irreprable Fissure Dear Burglar Love Poem to Injection-Site Reactions Asked If I Miss My Mother, I Say I Miss the House MS Nocturne According to Ecclesiastes Love Poem to Myself What I Didn't Call Her

"Fiercely imaginative, these heart-wrenching, lyric narrative poems are haunted by the body as a depository for trauma, the body with cancer, the body with MS, the body cut open and sacrificed, teaching us that grief comes from love while transforming us with exquisite and beautiful language that is simply breathtaking."--Judy Jordan "Gorgeous and devastating. . . . The combination of historical, mythographic, and real-while-invented female figurations offers a compelling and creative approach to bestowing Cole's never patronizing life-lessons with respect to loss, gender, and disablement. This book is teaching without didactics. . . . Cole's book as a crip feminist work is evocative not only of Chopin's nocturnes, but of Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition, ' including its own uniquely shifting transcripts, bold captions, and vivid image descriptions."--Diane R. Wiener, Wordgathering "To love means opening one's soul to the possibility of heartbreak. Enthralling all the way through, Thunderhead reads as a testament to passion itself--an invitation to recognize the bond between suffering and intense desire."--Barrelhouse