Download or read book Acts of Contortion written by Anna Meek and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In poems that are by turns witty, lush, and unflinching, Acts of Contortion explores the gestures of both hurtfulness and compassion. Whether set in a shelter for battered women, in the midst of a political demonstration, or at the center of an orchestra, the poems pursue the place of language in an injurious world. The political conscience at work is feminist, pacifist, and at odds with itself. Anna George Meek finds that the brutal and the compassionate are sometimes indistinguishable, born of our need to make contact outside of ourselves. These gestures--of music, of touch, of poetry--appear in the poems as the violin, domestic abuse, and words to comfort a woman in pain. The poems argue: difficult yet imperative, the attempt to gesture beyond ourselves is an act of contortion.