Digging Up My Bones is an important book – not just as a collection of poetry where the author uses words as both a weapon and a healing salve – but as a placeholder in history. Gwyndyn T. Alexander’s poetry illuminates a long road showing us where we have been, how far we have come, and the long journey ahead.
Drawing from Greek and Christian mythology, fairy tales, and issues that pervade society today, Alexander lays bare how today’s world still presents an uphill trial for women, and that while the temperature in the pot has indeed risen over the centuries and past few decades, we are now at a boiling point.
Gwyndyn T. Alexander’s poems take aim and strip the vestiges of privilege to create a more even playing field. Those in power cannot hide behind atrocities, casual infractions, and systemic behaviors that make women and minorities “less than.”
I encourage everyone to read Digging Up My Bones. I encourage parents and teachers to use it as a tool to improve the world. I challenge those who would otherwise be dismissive of the topics covered in this collection to step outside of their comfort zones and echo chambers, and let the author’s poems peel back the layers of what are accepted as “tolerable slights” to see how harmful and damning they really are to those individuals and groups who have been (and continue to be) on the receiving end.
From poetry that stands up to malicious authority in “Dark Ages”:
“Alone,
I am a firefly,
a tiny mote of light
in a sea of shadow
But when my tiny flame
joins yours,
and hers,
and his,
and theirs,
the darkness retreats.”
To taking on misogyny in all its forms in “Electra”:
“Your betrayal and rage
still inspire us
Your pain still roars
across the years
and dusty pages
Each poem I thrust
into the lies of men,
I wield in your name.”
To tearing down gender roles in the selection, “Boys Will Be Boys,” and the day-to-day gender imposition and power plays in “Why Can’t You Take A Compliment?”
This is a book I hope to see used in classrooms. These are poems everyone should read and reflect upon – not just for the here and now, or just for what the words mean to us personally, because these poems reflect personalities, situations, experiences, and larger issues that have been with us for a long time – and the need to change builds further momentum in the pages of Digging Up My Bones.
Digging Up My Bones, from B Cubed Press, features a foreward by the great Judith Tarr (and you owe it to yourself to read all of her books as well), Beth Patterson, musician, author, and artist extraordinaire, collaborated with Gwyndyn T. Alexander to create the eponymous song (featuring an all-star line-up) to go along with this new book:
You owe it to yourself to read this book if you enjoy writing that pulls you along the full spectrum of emotions, and the thoughts behind them, and are brave and open to the notion that you might learn something about yourself and others in the process.
