Poetry of Anne Shaw > Woodland Pattern Book Center

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Anne Shaw

Anne Shaw is the author of Undertow (Persea Books), winner of the 2006 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New American Writing, Court Green, Phoebe, 26, and numerous other journals. She teaches creative writing and lives in Milwaukee.

Anne Shaw's impressive debut Undertow (Persea Books, 2008) is propelled by wanderlust, its music derived from the rumble of freight trains and the heave of ferries through literal and imaginative waterways. Whether set in Maine or in Arizona, in Ecuador or in Thailand, in waking or in dreaming, each poem resounds with the beauty and remoteness of its locality. Re-imaginings of travelogues by some notable explorers and naturalists, including Sir Walter Raleigh and Georg Eberhard Rumphius, underscore the collection's restless yearning for motion. Undertow marks the emergence of a distinctive new voice.

Drag King Manifesto

Anne Shaw

That woman is an engine, I refuse. To generate. To be chambered. To combust.

Let her who would acquire don the masculine article. The necktie and the wingtip and the the.
The leather chair, its kingdom. As swishy shadow tidies in the wake.

I too unhitch my notice. I touch what I will touch. I wear roulette-wheel cufflinks
and filch the jack of diamonds from the deck.

I'll show you how to razor: Take off your gown of ghosts. Untie your solaces, unzip your name.

Let her who would be pirate begin in piracy. The double-breasted suit. The clip.
And Adam's apple pendant in the throat.

Let her who would go veiled take up her wrench, her drill. Up her sleeve the jackal
of hearts, the jack of jills.

Let her in frilled distress begin. To study the mallet, the screw.

And therefore tinker. Therefore crux. How treason wears the pants.

Let her who would go naked smith her tool.

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