Trio exemplifies how women become a clandestine conduit for life, power, and loss, particularly in the shadow of an implacable patriarchy.
Between two covers are three books: Planet Parable by Karen Donovan, Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull by Diane Raptosh, and Endless Body by Daneen Wardrop, all previous Etruscan authors. The poems in Planet Parable discover unexpected meaning in the quotidian recorded against the revelatory background hum of the world. Beginning with a woman using a backhoe to dig up a meadow, it ends with a divine purge, arriving at another beginning. The poems in between tangle with the earth’s own signifiers—sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic—written in water, fire, and pressure. Diane Raptosh’s collection brings to life one of America’s most controversial suffragists, Victoria Woodhull, giving a voice to her immediate circle. Woodhull was the first woman to address Congress and the first woman to run for United States president, with abolitionist Frederick Douglass as running mate. Daneen Wardrop’s Endless Body realizes a mother-daughter-mother lineage through music, quest, and a growing awareness of the body of the world as it traces a daughter’s loss of her mother, and the turning from loss to the arrival of that daughter’s own daughter. The body may never have assented to its own stern conditions, yet has many callings: tensing, speaking vapor, holding anger and, sometimes, letting us go.
Trio is the second in a series of trilogies from Etruscan Press, the first of which was Triptych (2020).
Karen Donovan is the author of Aard-vark to Axolotl, a collection of illustrated short prose (Etruscan, 2018). Diane Raptosh’s fourth book of poetry, American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press, 2013), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award. Daneen Wardrop is the author of Silk Road (Etruscan, 2018).
