Ringer: Poems

Ringer approaches womanhood from two directions: an examination of ways that women’s identities are tied to domestic spaces, like homes, cars, grocery stores, and daycare centers; and a consideration of physical, sexual, and political violence against women, both historically and in the present day. Lehmann’s poems look outward, and go beyond cataloguing trespasses against women by biting back against patriarchal systems of oppression, and against perpetrators of violence against women. Many poems in Ringer are ecopoetical, functioning in a ＂junk＂ or ＂sad＂ pastoral mode, inhabiting abandoned, forgotten, and sometimes impoverished landscapes of rural America.

Rebecca Lehmann is the author of Between the Crackups, winner of the Crashaw Prize. Her poems have been published in Tin House, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Boston Review, and more. She lives in South Bend, Indiana, where she is an assistant professor of English at Saint Mary’s College.