Things I Didn’t Do with This Body

Told in six parts, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body sings in myriad voices and forms—ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness.

Bedecked in Fenty and Shalimar, Amanda Gunn’s startling debut, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body, invites you to read with all of your senses and gives fresh meaning to the phrase a body of work. Told in six parts, this collection sings in myriad voices and forms—ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness. Both tender and emotionally raw, these poems interweave explorations of family and interrogations of history, including an unforgettable sequence that meditates on the life of Harriet Tubman. With Tubman’s portrait perched above her writing desk, Gunn pens poems that migrate from South to North, from elegy to prayer, from borrowed shame to self-acceptance. 

Writing with frankness and honesty, Gunn finds no thought, no memory, too private: a father’s verbal blow, a tense visit to a gynecologist’s table, the longing to be “erased/by a taxi at 50 miles an hour,” and grief at the loss of two former lovers, decades apart. Death is familiar here, yet we find softness, grace, and hope in the culinary lessons learned in warm family kitchens, in the communal laughter of a rehab center’s common room, and in the rewards and pleasures of the fat erotic. With poems as malleable as the skin that “misplaced one hundred nine pounds” and filled it again, Gunn proves that, for the Black body, memory often presents the heaviest weight. Things I Didn’t Do with This Body is a reminder that “carried in the body is the future, the present, and the past.” The most capable thing a body can do is remember and bear it and live.

Father at Table

Highway

Shells

My Father Speaks

All Things

'A Long Ways From Home'

To Kati Who Doesn't Remember

Monarch

Girl

After Surgery

The Last Day / Romania 1986

Look

II.

Araminta

39 Objects at the Smithsonian

Mystic

Coda: Refuge

III.

Go North

Notes on a Dream of Dying

Ordinary Sugar

Hypersisters

Repair Work

Admissions

Collect

IV.

The Name For

Chronic

Is It OK

Every Letter Every Word Every Page

Bad Romance

Good Romance

Level

V.

Wake

It's like We—

Return

Tyrant

Never Now

What You Meant

Kaleidoscope

VI.

Baker

Shalimar

Morning at Crash Boat Beach

Poetic Exercise in the Service of Love

Patience

Household

Stormwatching in Campania

Happy and Well

Elegy

Prayer

Things I Didn't Do With This Body & Things I Did

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