The poetry of slavery Book

Checked this out because Ching-Il had it on her "to read" list in GoodReads. But so glad I came to it. I'm engaged by the scope of it, by its uneasy balance between narrative and lyric.

To the plot: the book recounts the inner life of Varl over what seems to be a few months. Slave to a strange master who likes to have "oddities" in his stable of slaves (an albino slave, a dwarf, a literate woman (Varl's mother) who teaches the neighboring slaves to read.), Varl herself is an oddity for her independent spirit and her literary-ness.

The book's conceit is that Varl is embroidering the poems we read onto squares of cloth that she wears beneath her dress, a kind of coccoon (Larva/Varl) from which she will emerge, free (the name, actually, that her mother wanted to give her). Now that I write it out, this all sounds a bit convoluted. But I bought it. I read it. The poems sang.

All this setup, interesting as it is, is less important than what seems to be the poems central concern: the nature of freedom, of slavery. Moss moves into complicated territory, into taboos and moral uncertainties. Varl talks of her master's love for her - the dialogue comes to seem much like that of an abused daughter talking about her father's love. She ends up questioning what freedom is-- whether she has it more assuredly in slavery or out of it, whether she really longs, after all, for freedom. It's discomfiting. So I am enaged.

Formally, this is all free verse, with stanzas and lines of varying length. The chorus of words (freedom, love, mine, smart, moth) thread the book and act like small refrains. This is my first encounter with Moss's writing, and I hear her other work is vastly different. But I'm engaged.