The Visible Woman

In The Visible Woman, Allison Funk writes of how women often disappear into the roles expected of them, becoming invisible to themselves. To fill in "the thin / chalk outline" of herself that she's "drawn and erased" for as long as she can remember, Funk returns to the anatomical model of "The Visible Woman" she left unassembled as a child. With poems rather than the kit's plastic organs and bones, she strives to "create a likeness / to embody herself." In her efforts at self-representation, the poet is guided by the visual artist Louise Bourgeois- her real-life model of a woman who proved that art gives us a way of recognizing ourselves.In The Visible Woman, "with the care of a surgeon closing a wound," Allison Funk stitches together the scars of memory, loss, and grief, reclaiming a voice and visibility against a patriarchal erasure of women. In the care of her deft hands and uncompromising vision, I find myself not stunned into silence, but startled into the desire to advocate, to s