The Resurrection Trade [Paperback]

Leslie Adrienne Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2007

Poet Leslie Adrienne Miller's brilliant and provocative exploration of anatomical texts and historical assumptions about the body

Whoever they were, they're still with us,
posing demurely in suits of blood
and muscle, the bruised shadows
of what skin they do have . . .
                      --from "Gautier d'Agoty's Écorchés"

 

"The resurrection trade," the business of trafficking in corpses, is an old trade, one that makes possible the art of anatomy and, as poet Leslie Adrienne Miller discovers, the art of her own book. Miller delves into the mysteries of early anatomical studies and medical illustrations and finds there stories of women's lives--sometimes tragic, sometimes comic--as exposed as the drawings themselves. These meticulously researched and rendered poems become powerful testimonies to women's bodies objectified and misunderstood throughout history. Miller's sensuous and harrowing fifth collection brings a new truth to what she calls "the strange collusion of imaginary science and real art."

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The sale of corpses for medical, artistic, and other, even less savory purposes is a controlling metaphor for Miller in her sterling fourth collection. Although the corpses of men have been dissected and illustrated, women's bodies draw Miller's attention. With scrupulous, meticulous modesty, she enlivens the women subjected, without their knowledge or consent, to such public display. They were stripped literally to the bone for the male gaze, but the poet's female gaze gives them dignity. One, "The Flayed Angel," somehow in death keeps herself aloof from preying eyes, for in her portrait the inks "pushed out against their wells / of dark on water, thighs or fields, anywhere / the light is kept from falling, places / where the eye is urged to go but never see." The subject seems at first macabre, but before our fascinated and appalled gaze, Miller shows us how every body both reveals and conceals its secrets. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"The fierce, passionate observation and the rich pageantry of Leslie Adrienne Miller's poems have astonished me for twenty years now. Deeply original and constantly compelling, she is a poet as capable of deft portraiture as she is of wise philosophical and cultural reckonings." --David St. John

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Product Details

• Paperback: 100 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (March 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974635
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974633
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,281,088 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ekphrastic pleasures, March 7, 2007

By 

Thomas F. Dillingham (Columbia, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Resurrection Trade (Paperback)

I should start by admitting that I have known Leslie Adrienne Miller since she was an undergraduate; that is not a claim of authority, but an admission that I may have a bias. I don't think so, but the reader may judge.

Leslie Miller's poems, from her student chapbook through her five mature volumes (so far), offer rich and intense experiences; she has a sensitive and discerning eye for detail, a startling wit to make unexpected connections, and command of the language that allows her to create vivid illusions of presence. Others have commented on the wide-ranging and sophisticated materials of her poems, drawn not only from many places around the world, many periods of history, but also from a range of intimate experiences tied to issues of public importance in ways that assure the reader that there is matter of note in these lines.

The Resurrection Trade brings together a number of poems inspired by anatomical images, especially but not only of women's bodies, created during the 18th century by such artists as Gautier d'Agoty and Jan van Rymsdyk; one reaches back to the famous (and inaccurate) representation of copulation by Leonardo da Vinci, and another reconstructs for our minds' eyes the use of MRI technology to discover the actual interaction of the human organs of generation. Images of flayed bodies (collected for the purpose of dissection from gibbets and looted graveyards) offered to civilized eyes in poses of social insouciance or even self display, stimulate thoughts on the meanings of nakedness, of the exposure of what is private or kept unseen--who decides which are or are not proper to be seen?, who is allowed to expose the hidden and what conventions of representation allow the exposure to pass for respectable information? These pictures are medical science, not titillation, but as we see them we may need to choose between attraction and repulsion. The images are not erotic in any conventional sense, yet eroticism and sexuality pervade such representations, including these poems as verbal reconstructions of the visual images. But there is a kind of intellectual distance maintained in the critical analysis of the peculiar poses and settings the artists have used to normalize and, arguably, de-sexualize these variously tormented human bodies. Although the flesh, muscles, and organs of the bodies are horrifically ripped and wrenched, split open and drawn out, the one feeling never explicitly evoked is pain. But in Miller's poems responding to the images, the spectre of pain is ever present though seldom explicit.

Along with the ekphrastic poems, Miller includes as well some more personal or meditative poems, and a bravura metaphysical conceit (in "Cherries") asserting ownership from before her own birth of the child to whom she has given birth. Not only visual arts, however, sustain this book; many images of the power of music mix with the evocations of engravings, and both intertwine with poems about the ecstasies and horrors of motherhood, the pains of lost friendships, the frustrations of family interdependence.

Miller's ekphrastic poems do not stop with the word picture; some poets are content to evoke the image of the painting, photograph, or garden; like the better examples of that tradition, Miller's presentation of the picture is usually a prelude to a step through and beyond, or sometimes to the side, with a connection to a situation or relationship not exactly relevant or analogous to the subject of the picture, but ripe for association and possible deepened significance. Though the almost clinical examination of detail--both in the pictures and in the narratives of life experiences--might seem cold or distant, the poems, like the ecorches, remind us of the humanity of the observed. In the opening poem of the book, Miller describes her earlier poems as creating "memory of someone not quite gone," implying that there is more and different to be found here; that is so, but it could be said that all of her poems are about "someone not quite gone" because preserved either in these images or in her poems, themselves. This is a powerful book and a significant movement forward in Miller's poetic achievement. I strongly recommend it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic., November 12, 2007

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Resurrection Trade (Paperback)

Leslie Adrienne Miller, The Resurrection Trade (Graywolf Press, 2007)

I generally buy my poetry books as used bookstore "box day" sales or Half Price Books, so if memory serves, I paid more for The Resurrection Trade than I have for any book of poetry I've bought in the past five or so years. (I couldn't wait for the library to get this one in, I had to have it ASAP.) I'm not sure why, but I was somewhat surprised that this exquisite collection was worth every penny and then some. I had a huge problem picking an excerpt for this review; putting aside the (wonderful) stuff that couldn't be quoted without tripping Amazon's obscenity filter left me with, well, the entire rest of the book. So I opened to a page at random and started typing:

"My mother is Miss Kitty following the drunks

with her sponge, lifting the stains of sauce and ash.

Horse tails, trolls, and the satin settee in Jeannie's bottle

all fall into the laughter of one stalled woman,

flirty, high, and tight, forced out in little bursts

of derailed wit, the bitter snigger of a woman

who must have felt judged by a mother like mine."

("Bridge Club")

Miller writes with wit, though that wit is often, as above, slightly jaundiced; her topics are often those we know well, though the spins she puts on things make them new, as the old bromide goes, and the writing simply flows from the page to the eyes, commanding and seducing. This is very, very good stuff, and you should get to know Leslie Adrienne Miller's work. ****

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars take a full look at this book, June 6, 2008

By 

Dark Lake "dark lake" (minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Resurrection Trade (Paperback)

The Resurrection Trade is an amazing book. Based on research Miller did in France, she poetically examines the female body via Victorian anatomical pictures created for gentleman doctors. The book looks at the gaze of the medical/male at the time, and responds from the female point of view. Woven into the text are personal poems about motherhood and her own birthing experience. This is Miller's fifth book, and it is coherent and academic.