In a Land Where Everything Is Trying to Kill You, I Teach You to be an Autotomist

← v20n2, Fall 2021

A poem in which a parent teaches a child to practice self-protective detachment, likened to a lizard shedding its tail.

Full text for this piece is being migrated from the archive.

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of two books of poetry: Redmouth (Tinderbox Editions, 2019) and Wilder (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. Her poems are forthcoming in Copper Nickel , Descant , Grist , Image , Kenyon Review Online , Washington Square Review , and elsewhere. She is a 2020 McKnight Writing Fellow and teaches in the Twin Cities. Photo by Daniel Lupton