The Five Stages of Stuttering
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$16.00
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Flowersong Press
The Five Stages of Stuttering
$16.00
Sale price
$16.00
Regular price
Ready to ship in 3 - 5 days
The Five Stages of Stuttering is a poetic exploration of the connection between stuttering and grief. Stuttering is a fluency disorder. It is an interruption of the flow of speaking. A verbal paralysis. "I had to start where-where-where I left off," Cassie Holguin-Pettinato writes. The emotional pain of her words is exacerbated with every repetition. Her poems about family estrangement, chronic pain, divorce, postpartum depression, and unspoken traumas are interrupted with blockages and interjections. What if poetry itself is a form of disfluency commonly referred to as stuttering? "I couldn't speak the language of my mother. And so I hid the sacred clown in me." Stuttering is a form of disconnection from the original tongue. Snippets of a foreign language become bullets in times of war. Holguin-Pettinato's poetry is deeply rooted in place yet simultaneously estranged from it. "There is no grave to visit the living/Here." The poet needs to go through all the stages of grief-denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance-before she can finally begin to find her voice. "I want [ ] peace," Cassie Holguin-Pettinato writes. "Sadness is on me for a little while." The final stage of grief and stuttering is acceptance and revision. And then the poetry begins.
Book Details
- Publisher:
- Flowersong Press
- ISBN:
- 9781963245370
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Pages:
- 90
- Authors:
- Cassie Holguin-Pettinato
- Published Date:
- 2024-03-26
- Language:
- English
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About Cassie Holguin-Pettinato
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The Five Stages of Stuttering, a debut collection from El Paso, TX poet Cassie Holguin-Pettinato, takes readers on a journey of loss and survival. Amputation, both literal and figurative, is a motif throughout the book. In the first poem, "In The Beginning," the speaker receives a box of kittens with missing limbs; her father "violently put them in a box and left them next door", but it's too late—she's already fallen in love with them. The speaker's father reappears in "The Shop" where he saws off doll limbs for her to wear on a necklace. In the poem, "The Son of Joseph and Ashikai" a baby's toes and fingers are amputated in the womb, "His left hand became the shape / of love in sign language." Love and loss live together here, twins surviving the social norms imposed by religion, military, and family. Holguin-Pettinato's strength of voice and vision carry us forward out of trauma toward hope and dreams, both for the speaker's daughter, and for the development of her own creativity as a poet and artist. If she starts the narrative with a stutter, she closes with a voice confident in its ability and chosen path.