For sale on etsy! Click to buy.
Scratch the Bone
(Unthinkable Creatures Chapbook Press 2013)
By Tamryn Spruill
From the publisher: Scratch the Bone is a cut-and-paste text about trauma, memory, and inheritance. What "sticks"? What's embedded? How far below the surface is the itch, and what do you need to reach it?
16 pages, black and white
hand-bound with block print cover
(Unthinkable Creatures Chapbook Press 2013)
By Tamryn Spruill
From the publisher: Scratch the Bone is a cut-and-paste text about trauma, memory, and inheritance. What "sticks"? What's embedded? How far below the surface is the itch, and what do you need to reach it?
16 pages, black and white
hand-bound with block print cover
For sale at robocup press! Click to buy.
The Opposite of Robots: Poems
(robocup press 2012)
By Tamryn Spruill
In The Opposite of Robots, Tamryn Spruill takes on the world, the flesh, and the anatomy of longing. Daring in her refusal to simplify or sweeten "the bitter roots of my needing ways," the speaker in these poems sets her sights on nothing less than a transformation of the static material of depression and self-loathing into inklings of what Grace Paley wonderfully termed "the open destiny of life." As I finished the collection, I felt like the opposite of a voyeur, for Spruill's habit of scrutinizing "the guts of everything" registered as a potent, energizing challenge to explore my own "oft-unnerving innards." -Jan Clausen, author of If You Like Difficulty
"With a deep sense of movement and a reverence for the seriousness of play (in the sense of holding a space for things to be experienced in), Tamryn Spruill's The Opposite of Robots asks whether it is our flesh that makes us human, or our damage. These poems, packed with immense curiosity and smart wordplay, are, as Tamryn writes in one poem, "mostly vulnerable": deeply traumatized, reaching (towards) something beautiful, and heart-felt (in the sense of the muscle that pulses). The Opposite of Robots is a gorgeous book that documents the never-finished work of splaying, cataloging, and re-assembling the parts both soft and hard that make us up." -Kristen Stone, author of Domestication Handbook
"Tamryn Spruill's raw poems examine the intersection of flesh and soul, death and renewal. Spruill's poems are an inquiry into language as gut - "from the bones/we rip meat with sharp teeth and/dismantle lithe limbs with strong jaws." In the body space where flesh is both pain-filled and joyful, Spruill etches out her own self and spirit, defiantly. In this beautiful and daring collection, the reader will be devoured and emerge, too, with scar tissues "all pink and unquestioning." The Opposite of Robots shows us what it feels like to be human." -Teresa Mei Chuc, author of Red Thread: Poems
(robocup press 2012)
By Tamryn Spruill
In The Opposite of Robots, Tamryn Spruill takes on the world, the flesh, and the anatomy of longing. Daring in her refusal to simplify or sweeten "the bitter roots of my needing ways," the speaker in these poems sets her sights on nothing less than a transformation of the static material of depression and self-loathing into inklings of what Grace Paley wonderfully termed "the open destiny of life." As I finished the collection, I felt like the opposite of a voyeur, for Spruill's habit of scrutinizing "the guts of everything" registered as a potent, energizing challenge to explore my own "oft-unnerving innards." -Jan Clausen, author of If You Like Difficulty
"With a deep sense of movement and a reverence for the seriousness of play (in the sense of holding a space for things to be experienced in), Tamryn Spruill's The Opposite of Robots asks whether it is our flesh that makes us human, or our damage. These poems, packed with immense curiosity and smart wordplay, are, as Tamryn writes in one poem, "mostly vulnerable": deeply traumatized, reaching (towards) something beautiful, and heart-felt (in the sense of the muscle that pulses). The Opposite of Robots is a gorgeous book that documents the never-finished work of splaying, cataloging, and re-assembling the parts both soft and hard that make us up." -Kristen Stone, author of Domestication Handbook
"Tamryn Spruill's raw poems examine the intersection of flesh and soul, death and renewal. Spruill's poems are an inquiry into language as gut - "from the bones/we rip meat with sharp teeth and/dismantle lithe limbs with strong jaws." In the body space where flesh is both pain-filled and joyful, Spruill etches out her own self and spirit, defiantly. In this beautiful and daring collection, the reader will be devoured and emerge, too, with scar tissues "all pink and unquestioning." The Opposite of Robots shows us what it feels like to be human." -Teresa Mei Chuc, author of Red Thread: Poems
© 2012-2015 TamrynSpruill.com.
