Muzzle - by Rivka Clifton (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In her debut full collection of poetry, Rivka Clifton, a curator of curiosities, challenges us to consider language as a form of violence. Challenges us to understand what violence can be: memory, both lived and re-lived. Rivka draws on her personal journey with these powerful landscapes, which are part incantation, part exorcism. The poems in Muzzle contemplate the relationship between speech and violence and how translating the experience of grief and loss into language can itself be a form of violence-through one's initial experience and living memory. How can everyday speech be violent, how can small violences be a means of communication-these are the questions posed to us by Muzzle. As we traverse the poems in this collection, we are invited to consider our own lives, our own relationship with memory, grief, loss, love, and, yes, violence.

Review Quotes

Welcome to Muzzle: Rivka Clifton's kaleidoscopic meditation on the viscerality of language. In this collection, Clifton braids a knack for choice diction and phrasing with a distinct facility for image-driven narrative and delivers poems that evoke emotional nuance and depth. The urgency behind these poems is like that of the pulse: insistent, carnal, necessary. These poems explore the multiple meanings of its title word, the various definitions and uses acting out how each word is "[a] body within a body," shifting and restless. These poems take on as truth that the "tongue is a mysterious beast- / all it loves plummets down the throat"-and follow this sensorial understanding of language down into surreal yet eerily familiar depths.

-José Angel Araguz, author of Rotura

Rivka Clifton's debut poetry collection, Muzzle, teaches us to wrap fear around our shoulders like a haunted shawl. To our delight, this keeps us warm, as even the most innocuous things-leaves on a lawn, a stray hair, even the moon and stars in various iterations-become sinister and foreboding. Clifton's poetry thins the threshold between human and beast, nightmare and joyful epiphany.

-Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy

In Rivka Clifton's riveting debut Muzzle, one can feel the bristling gravity of concision and the turning of a blade in each carved line. This visceral collection navigates desire, trauma, the slipperiness of the self, and the out-of-body horror of the mundane. The speakers of these poems twist and morph, at once husband, wife, child, hunter, animal, myth, and the dark itself calling through a kind of god-mouth, consuming all. In these stunning dreamscapes, flowers bloom into a brain, lightning unchains a boy's teeth, and the "delicate Morse/inside a throat" hammers against the page. Simultaneously enchanting and frightening, Muzzle invites us to re-see our apocalyptic worlds and reckon with the animal impulses rippling under our own skin.

-Hadara Bar-Nadav, author of The Animal is Chemical