Emma Bolden - The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis

Praise for The Tiger and the Cage

In The Tiger and the Cage, the call is coming from inside the houseor, rather, from inside the body. In the beautiful prose of a poet, Emma Bolden confronts the patriarchal foundation of the institutions that make our lives what they are: education, religion, medicine. If patriarchyand frankly, misogynyis part of medical care, then via each surgeons scalpel and each prescribed medication, it is also inside us. The Tiger and the Cage opened my eyes, enraged me, and left me in awe of Boldens enormous talent as a writer, intelligence as a critic, and courage as a survivor.

Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod and Keep Moving

A harrowing portrait of endurance and grief and resilience. With raw honesty and exacting detail, Bolden tells an intimate story while exploring the demands our oppressive culture places on womenour supposed hopes and dreams, our supposed desires and fears, and most poignantly of all the expectations on our bodies, what they should do and how they should behave. It is part damning critique of our male-dominated medical institutions and, quietly, a loving tribute to a mother-daughter bond.

Julianna Baggott, author of The Seventh Book of Wonders

Layer by shimmering layer, Emma Bolden transforms the story of her body into the story of a search for truth. The Tiger and the Cage elegantly interrogates narratives of gender, pain, sexuality, and family to reveal the freedom underneath.

Angela Chen, author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

In brief, lyrical, and powerful essays, Emma Bolden unleashes her story of endometriosis, and the misogyny she endured at the hands of the medical establishment, interwoven with stories of a supportive and loving Southern upbringing. The Tiger and the Cage is a torrent of feeling. It is a left-hook to the jaw to anyone learning for the first time about the neglectful ways women are often treated when their bodies need help. It is a soft, supportive whisper to those of us who know it too well. May it find its way into the hands of doctors and those in training, and their patients, too, who will find a voice in this book, one speaking with clarity and purpose, that affirms their own experiences.

Chantel Acevedo, author of The Distant Marvels

Emma Boldens The Tiger and the Cage is a memoir written as an investigation, a dive into what it means to be a woman caught in a medical establishment that doesnt listen to women. I read this book in a fury. Boldens imagery is stark and vivid, and the prose moves in a spiral, encircling her pain, her confusion, and her strength. This book will make you laugh, cry, scream, and bleach your hair while you sing along loudly to Tori Amos. I am so grateful The Tiger and the Cage exists and so grateful for Emma Boldens generosity.

Emme Lund, author of The Boy with a Bird in His Chest

This philosophical, funny, and beautiful memoir is both a work of art and a deep conversation about the rift between mind and body, those two great friends and rivals handcuffed together forever. Well-armed with a genuine Greek chorus, a truly excellent and private sense of humor, and incredible gifts for metaphor, Emma Bolden opens the vault for the reader into the true experience of how it feels to both reckon daily with a ravaging illness and also to carry on and make the most of ones life.

If literature is the great river that runs alongside life, interpreting it, then this book is that river[it] is deep and vigorous and vital, flashing with transcendence, thinking so richly about the human body, wondering at its mortality and fragility with love and humor and patience and strength.

Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories

Praise for House Is an Enigma

House Is an Enigma is a staggering achievement. These poems worry several stones in their pocketsgrief and the body, certainly, rubbing both until they gleambut also language and its deliciously endless possibilities. What can I say but that the mind whirring inside these poems, this beautiful lyric-building mind, is one I wish were housed in my own skull? What can I say but give yourself over to these poems, and if youre very, very lucky, some of Emma Boldens genius may seep into youand leave you, too, irrevocably changed.

Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

Emma Boldens gorgeous poems brilliantly remind me of learning to draw with colored pencils. To make a pencil drawing really stand out, one must begin with the lightest of touches and unexpected colors, like, say, lavenderfor a banana. Her poems ache with intelligence while layering desire, melancholy, and a delicate griefand before you know it, we are transported to years where we wore leather & guitar music sweet with distortion and savored the taste of peppermint bright as teeth. Boldens poems are visceral and profoundly preciseall while balancing a quiet playfulness and dazzle of color that I know Ill return to again and again.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic

Emma Bolden writes: House doesnt care about your intentions, your repairs. House dares / you. Every poem in House Is an Enigma is a darea window opening to a gorgeous room or century, a terrifying or luminous sky. It is also a brilliant, inventive, and deeply felt exploration of lossnamely, the potential for motherhood and all that future-imagining might entail. Filled with ghosts, skywriters, skulls, mouths, and fragile crinoline beauty, these poems dwell in the liminal space of self-questioning and what it means to inhabit an imperfect female body. Can one separate the bodys lost creative potential from language itself? What are we without our imagining? If the poet is cut off from the metaphor of the body as a home/house, what is there? But Boldens questioning is not devoid of life, love, or longingquite the opposite. Please open yourself to Boldens witchy, wise, and breathtaking visionwhats possible for all of us in the long hallways of our hearts.

Sarah Messer, author of Dress Made of Mice

Emma Boldens House Is an Enigma is a masterful book that serves as a map through the dark museum of loss. After great pain, a formal feeling comes, Emily Dickinson writes, and Emma Boldens poems are the light that we, as readers, will wonder out towards after the formal feeling has gone: Let grief be the song that troubles down / the keys of your spine. The music that emanates from these poems can fill even the largest room that loss can build. These poems boldly become light even in the face of the darkest of darks.

Adam Clay, author of Stranger

THE TIGER AND THE CAGE

ALSO BY EMMA BOLDEN
House Is an Enigma
medi(t)ations
Maleficae

For my parents,
with all my love and all my gratitude
for taking every step along with me

He feels as though there were a thousand bars and behind the thousand bars no world.

RAINER MARIA RILKE
The Panther
(trans. Brigitte Wallinger-Schorn)

Contents

IN FIFTH GRADE, MY TEACHER SPENT AN ENTIRE SEMESTER on the water cycle. I learned how temperatures fall, how water molecules join hands and then jump from the clouds. I learned how, in high clouds, crystal hexagons form. At lower altitudes, water freezes to needles. I learned that the clouds themselves arent solid structures. Instead, theyre collections of microscopic water droplets clinging to dust, to tiny scraps of the earth on which we walk and write in the margins of books and lay down against crisp sheets to sleep. If the temperature falls far enough, ice crystals cluster around dust particles, gathering together into snowflakes brittle enough to break as they fall. In Alabama, snow was a miracle, a tall tale parents told while gathered around an unlit fireplace.