Embouchure: Poems

By Emilia Phillips

Book Overview

★"This poignant and intimate account of discovery hums with pitch-perfect humor and triumphs that hit hard." Publishers Weekly, starred review

An embouchure is the way in which a wind musician applies their mouth to an instrument's mouthpiece, and Embouchure, Emilia Phillips's fourth poetry collection, sets its mouth, ready to play. Trumpeting a picaresque coming out story, the poems are at turns self-deprecatory and revelatory, exploring sexual fluidity and non-monosexuality. From the speaker's adolescent crushes to her closeted 20s to her eventual acceptance of queerness, her disarming joy--even at her own mistakes--is cut with challenges to toxic masculinity and reckonings with anticipatory anxiety. The tomboy the speaker once was is transfigured into "a presexual soft butch / Medusa" with a "beautiful, beautiful / body that didn't know yet // how to contain itself." Elsewhere, the speaker evades a Dickinsonian personification of Death, who seems more like an inescapable ex-boyfriend than a welcome bridegroom. Phillips's mock-confessionalism is as brassy as it is vulnerable.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1629222089
• ISBN13: 9781629222080
• Release Date: March 2021
• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Length: 90 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.8" x 8.7"