Embouchure: Poems

This poignant and intimate account of discovery hums with pitch-perfect humor and triumphs that hit hard. Publishers Weekly, starred review

An embouchure is the way in which a wind musician applies their mouth to an instrument’s mouthpiece, and Embouchure, Emilia Phillips’s fourth poetry collection, sets its mouth, ready to play. Trumpeting a picaresque coming out story, the poems are at turns self-deprecatory and revelatory, exploring sexual fluidity and non-monosexuality. From the speaker’s adolescent crushes to her closeted 20s to her eventual acceptance of queerness, her disarming joy–even at her own mistakes–is cut with challenges to toxic masculinity and reckonings with anticipatory anxiety. The tomboy the speaker once was is transfigured into a presexual soft butch / Medusa with a beautiful, beautiful / body that didn’t know yet // how to contain itself. Elsewhere, the speaker evades a Dickinsonian personification of Death, who seems more like an inescapable ex-boyfriend than a welcome bridegroom. Phillips’s mock-confessionalism is as brassy as it is vulnerable.