Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. "Calenture. The first time I heard the word, I saw her diving. From the cliffs of Kuttawa, her long arc into the lake they flooded a town to create. A fever so verdant it calls you by name. The water was vaguely green-edged that summer. Some algal bloom, which never hindered my sister. I never jumped. Not then. Years later, the fever came for me, blind in her wake. It called me by her name. "Poe said 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.' I don't want it to be true, but here we are. Every elegy needs an author. And then, an autopsy. "In the decade after she died, my poetry became diagnostic, archaic, hysteric, mesmeric. This book is ossuary to a constellation of deaths, some sudden, all strange. It is also a catalogue of medical and mercurial oddities, curiosities that call forth the exquisite corpse hard at work beneath our living flesh. The echolalic duet between what is lost and what is left behind. The phantom limb. The wandering womb. The book bound in skin. The face that ghosts itself. The fever dream that ends in drowning. The writhing grace of speaking in tongues. The Holy Ghost, that only permissible husband in the unkempt dance of our girlhood. Home: our pale host to long winters and shared delusions, borne of boredom and endless grooming. The countless ways in which we coaxed our bodies into clothes and, later, coffins. "This is what I know, now. It is never banal to watch someone unfurl. "Come in, won't you? The grass is fine."--Lindsay Tuggle

Calenture

Literature & Fiction

Tuggle, Lindsay

Poetry

Cordite Books

The Afterlives of Specimens explores the space between science and sentiment, the historical moment when the human cadaver became both lost love object and subject of anatomical violence. Walt Whitman witnessed rapid changes in relations between the living and the dead. In the space of a few decades, dissection evolved from a posthumous punishment inflicted on criminals to an element of preservationist technology worthy of the presidential corpse of Abraham Lincoln. Whitman transitioned from a fervent opponent of medical bodysnatching to a literary celebrity who left behind instructions for his own autopsy, including the removal of his brain for scientific study.  Grounded in archival discoveries, Afterlives traces the origins of nineteenth-century America’s preservation compulsion, illuminating the influences of botanical, medical, spiritualist, and sentimental discourses on Whitman’s work. Tuggle unveils previously unrecognized connections between Whitman and the leading “medical men” of his era, such as the surgeon John H. Brinton, founding curator of the Army Medical Museum, and Silas Weir Mitchell, the neurologist who discovered phantom limb syndrome. Remains from several amputee soldiers whom Whitman nursed in the Washington hospitals became specimens in the Army Medical Museum.  Tuggle is the first scholar to analyze Whitman’s role in medically memorializing the human cadaver and its abandoned parts.

The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman's Civil War (Iowa Whitman Series)

History & Criticism

University Of Iowa Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tuggle, Lindsay. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Tuggle, Lindsay