AS I SAID: A DISSENT

ISBN: 978-1-938900-43-3
Publication date: Summer 2022
116 pages, 7” x 9.5”
Read Press Release (PDF)

SYNOPSIS

In As I Said: A Dissent, Abby Minor rejects the vacated terms of the conventional “abortion debate.” Instead, these polyvocal poems explore the “exquisite business” of inheritance, embodiment, justice, and citizenship. Anchored by a documentary study of the infamous nineteenth-century abortion provider Madame Restell, Minor’s dissent deftly interweaves historical documents and oral interviews with frank details of contemporary Appalachian life. As I Said eludes the instrumentalization of reproductive storytelling in favor of becoming “aperture / at once seeing / and being ajar.”

EXCERPT

but have you heard

of a floral radiograph? I’d like

to make a feature-
length of x-rayed daffodils, & it

would be a silent film, & the title
cards would go   ONCE

in a black silk gown, Once
in a white satin bonnet, Once
in a heavy lace veil—
Once in a private April, Once
she was a clean cord of smoke—

(from ONCE IN A BLACK SILK GOWN: A FILM NOIR)

PRAISE

Abby Minor’s As I Said: A Dissent is a brilliant deep dive into intertwined histories between poet and subject and arrives on the heels of ruinous antiabortion rulings, certainly making this a reading of our daily tea leaves. I love this wild ride of soft beauty and harsh realities through the tabloid hell of nineteenth-century New York City and the poet’s own Appalachia. And I applaud Minor, a poet with the guts to humanize “the wickedest woman in New York.”

-Brenda Coultas, author of The Tatters

Abby Minor writes lines that dance and leap, each a necessary testament to a life planted in the ridges of Appalachia and reaching back to the nits of New York tenements. Maximalist miner at the microfilm machine, at the interview, at personal memory and public myth, she challenges oppression with a wink: nimble humor and no-joke, vulnerable commitments to beauty and truth. This book matters—not least because it is a deep pleasure to read, satisfying in its art and surprising in its generosity and range of engagement.

-Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields

AUTHOR

Abby Minor lives in the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania, where she works on poems, essays, and projects exploring reproductive politics. Granddaughter of Appalachian tinkerers and Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers, she teaches poetry in her region’s low-income nursing homes and has worked as a seamstress, server, university writing instructor, produce truck driver, studio assistant, and roadie. In 2018 she was awarded Bitch Media’s Writing Fellowship in Sexual Politics. She serves on the Board of Abortion Conversation Projects; is author of the chapbooks Real Words for Inside (Gap Riot Press) and Plant Light, Dress Light (dancing girl press); and directs an arts education nonprofit called Ridgelines Language Arts.

DESIGNERS & ARTIST

Book design by Sandra Rosales

Interior Layout by Scott Dennison

Cover art by Laia Abril