Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery

Tina Carlson is also the author of Ground, Wind, This Body: Poems (UNM Press).

Tina Carlson's images are always palpable, surprising, their resonance almost too powerful for the page. What she does with those images, how she shapes and where she takes them, is an experience her readers won't forget. I am still catching my breath."—Margaret Randall, author of Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises "Here lies a beauty great enough to capture and heal an aching heart, elegiac enough to canonize the lost. These poems cut a path lit by the ancestral flint of Carlson's scalpel. Stepping out into the light after the dark theater of these poems, one perceives more readily a world stripped of its skin, fed by their true seeing, their lazar gaze, and Carlson's own crooked smile, these the touchstones of her artistic reliquary."—Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium"In A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, vulnerable myths and porous pasts are 'blown open.' These poems unhinge for the reader a kind of nourishment. 'We were once specks of light,' Carlson writes, as she moves us toward illumination."—Lauren Camp, author of Took House "These are the poems, poet Tina Carlson the guide we need at this crucial time in the inferno of our own making."—Carole Simmons Oles, author of A Selected History of Her Heart: Poems

• Backyard of Her AlphabetsGhost Town on Iris AvenueA Guide to Tongue Tie SurgeryMy Mother as MoonCigarette Smoke and a Blue ImpalaGran ViaAgoraphobiaMy Father Comes Home from War with GunsMy Father PrayedMud BabiesThe Embassy of SilenceAt the Rest Stop, Fully Gloved, She Calls Me MommyYou Will Dream that Great Aunt Dolor Loves Your Wild HairDark DowryHow holy the cloth sewn sidewiseSheltering in Place for BeginnersCoat-Grave, Nation of MothsALMAAnatomy of SilenceFin Feather Bark and SkinDay after AmericaMetronome and Daruma DollAs Numbers of Dead Rise, Moths Fill the RoomLampshade and Floor MatTurn the Ship AroundSaint UrsulaHeavenSnow QueenThe Little Robber GirlMonsterOpen Your MouthWhy did you kill your wife, mr XYZ?Thirteen Children Rescued from Their Parents TestifyIce MatronWest Side Murders, Seven Years LaterHow She Becomes a FountainEvery Bird in My Blood Has a NameFlo and the Frozen GirlGuest Place in the ShadowThere I Stood, in All My FormsUntil I Could No Longer Fly and So Became a Map: PegasusFrom the Island of PomegranatesPandora on the Mother RoadAtlasThere I stood begging at the door of my deathI Fled the Dry Lips of MenDermoidDear Human,The Flying BoyWearing His Father's Dog TagsFeathers Appear on Branches as FlameAnd When He Thought He Had Found MeIn the Tree MuseumThe PainterMartiaAvalancheMachu PicchuNotesAcknowledgements