Synopsis "DNA Hymn (in English)"
DNA Hymn is a phenomenal work of embrace and exorcism. Using lyrical tricks and linguistic intuition, Annah Anti-Palindrome has mapped a world of survival, finding deep beauty everywhere. A serious literary triumph. -Michelle Tea (Valencia) ... DNA Hymn is a double helix of creation and re-creation, naming the hard price and tender pleasures of inheritance. This book is a gorgeous, rich song of restraints and bonds, attraction and repulsion, and truths that are elemental, in a voice as lovely on the page as it is to the ears. -Daphne Gottlieb (Kissing Dead Girls) ... Every poet teaches us what a poem can be. Annah Anti-Palindrome shows us how all small things are a testament to survival. A stained tooth offers gritty sagacity. A thistle growing in the compost pile foreshadows tremendous change. A stray eyelash makes an overture of longing. Only a deft and daring poet can connect so many incisive details to a much larger narrative of survival. By the end of DNA Hymn, the amassing of small things transforms trauma into undeniable wisdom. For those of you who learn, like I do, through poetry, be thankful for Annah Anti-Palindrome's lessons. -Amber Dawn (How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir) ... In her long-awaited debut collection, DNA Hymn, Annah Anti-Palindrome panned for gold, and she found it: working class, rural-femme survivor gold, unearthed by the brilliant hard femme poetic labor of its creator. This book is an essential weapon in the work we do to defy and transform all of our best and most crucial inheritances. Adaptogen magic bursting out of its mullein, morphine, blood and honey laden soil, hitchhiking home to a queer land off the map. - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Dirty River) ... Sometimes the act of reading can save you from yourself. Reading Annah Anti-Palindrome's DNA Hymn did just that for me. I began to read with a hope of forgettig, yet arrived at a place of remembering--a place that can only be found in a book--on the page and in that space in between. I will always remember these words. -Truong Tran (Dust and Conscience) ... DNA Hymn does not hesitate: this debut collection is the hard-swallowed keystone in a larger history that is as deeply painful as it is stunning, as much archive as it is mythology, & as entrenched in epigenetics as it is in etymology. Each poem insists on our attention, on our surrender-& we would be fools to turn away from such generosity. Few poets can play with language so deftly & still make us feel the weight of life or death in each word. Let this book saw you open & keep you from inheriting your own hurt. -Meg Day (Last Psalm at Sea Level)
