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The Glass Crib, Poems by Amanda Auchter

The Glass Crib

  • Amanda Auchter
  • Amanda Auchter

You wore your Baby Soft and blue dress.
You were in your car and smoking.
I was the accident month.
I was your ill-fitting jacket.
I was your craving for sugar and salt.
You sent me your half-bottle of vodka.
I was drunk and swerving.
You hid in your closet.
You hid me in your gray sweatshirt.
I watched my cells double and stick.
You said I want my body back.
I said your body is my body.
You said I’ll kill you with the stairs.
You said I’ll kill you I’ll kill you.
I said I’m still here.
You said please don’t tell—
I told with my soccer kick.
I told with my umbilical tug

 

  • About Amanda Auchter
  • Amanda Auchter is the founding editor of Pebble Lake Review and the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2012 Perugia Press Prize and the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry, The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry, and the chapbook Light Under Skin. She has received awards and honors from Bellevue Literary Review, BOMB Magazine, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, and was a 2007 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and teaches creative writing and literature at Lone Star College. She is currently at work on a memoir about adoption and the foster care system, What Took You So Long.
  • In Praise of The Glass Crib
  • “Rendered with acute beauty, tenderness and measured dignity of expression, Amanda Auchter¹s debut collection breathes life into her speakers and themes: a woman in a coma, biblical figures, the divine and the earthly, an unborn child, being and nothingness, a daughter given up for adoption, the body and the soul, a hung-over unwed mother. These poems radiate insistent light, pure lyric courage and unflagging compassion.” —Amy Gerstler
  • “The journey to and out of The Glass Crib is a heart-breaking one with moments of revelation and gravity that will take the reader’s breath away. But this book will also be remembered for its countless lines of breath-taking beauty. Auchter shows enviable precision in orchestrating image and music—each poem a perfect sensory song. . . The Glass Crib heralds the arrival of a poet with the courage and the craft to write about the destruction and restoration of “the dissolving body” and its spirit, “the scattered seeds.” This is poetry borne out of perseverance, not self-pity, and shaped by a clarity of vision, not by an outraged perspective. To read Amanda Auchter is to experience healing, joy, celebration, and above all, surprise.” ​—Rigoberto Gonzalez
The Glass Crib, Poems by Amanda Auchter

The Glass Crib

  • Amanda Auchter
  • 10.00
  • Poetry
  • Gospel of the Unplanned Child

You wore your Baby Soft and blue dress.
You were in your car and smoking.
I was the accident month.
I was your ill-fitting jacket.
I was your craving for sugar and salt.
You sent me your half-bottle of vodka.
I was drunk and swerving.
You hid in your closet.
You hid me in your gray sweatshirt.
I watched my cells double and stick.
You said I want my body back.
I said your body is my body.
You said I’ll kill you with the stairs.
You said I’ll kill you I’ll kill you.
I said I’m still here.
You said please don’t tell—
I told with my soccer kick.
I told with my umbilical tug

 

The Glass Crib

  • Amanda Auchter
  • 10.00
  • Poetry
The Glass Crib, Poems by Amanda Auchter
  • Gospel of the Unplanned Child

You wore your Baby Soft and blue dress.
You were in your car and smoking.
I was the accident month.
I was your ill-fitting jacket.
I was your craving for sugar and salt.
You sent me your half-bottle of vodka.
I was drunk and swerving.
You hid in your closet.
You hid me in your gray sweatshirt.
I watched my cells double and stick.
You said I want my body back.
I said your body is my body.
You said I’ll kill you with the stairs.
You said I’ll kill you I’ll kill you.
I said I’m still here.
You said please don’t tell—
I told with my soccer kick.
I told with my umbilical tug

 

  • About Amanda Auchter
  • Amanda Auchter is the founding editor of Pebble Lake Review and the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2012 Perugia Press Prize and the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry, The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry, and the chapbook Light Under Skin. She has received awards and honors from Bellevue Literary Review, BOMB Magazine, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, and was a 2007 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and teaches creative writing and literature at Lone Star College. She is currently at work on a memoir about adoption and the foster care system, What Took You So Long.
  • In Praise of The Glass Crib
  • “Rendered with acute beauty, tenderness and measured dignity of expression, Amanda Auchter¹s debut collection breathes life into her speakers and themes: a woman in a coma, biblical figures, the divine and the earthly, an unborn child, being and nothingness, a daughter given up for adoption, the body and the soul, a hung-over unwed mother. These poems radiate insistent light, pure lyric courage and unflagging compassion.” —Amy Gerstler
  • “The journey to and out of The Glass Crib is a heart-breaking one with moments of revelation and gravity that will take the reader’s breath away. But this book will also be remembered for its countless lines of breath-taking beauty. Auchter shows enviable precision in orchestrating image and music—each poem a perfect sensory song. . . The Glass Crib heralds the arrival of a poet with the courage and the craft to write about the destruction and restoration of “the dissolving body” and its spirit, “the scattered seeds.” This is poetry borne out of perseverance, not self-pity, and shaped by a clarity of vision, not by an outraged perspective. To read Amanda Auchter is to experience healing, joy, celebration, and above all, surprise.” ​—Rigoberto Gonzalez
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