Brynne Rebele-Henry

Brynne Rebele-Henry’s poetry collection, Autobiography of a Wound, won the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize, was one of Library Journal’s Top Fall Poetry Picks for 2018, and was a finalist for the 2019 Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award. Her first novel, Orpheus Girl, received the 2021 Young Adult Virginia Author Award from the Richmond Public Library and was listed as one of the most anticipated YA novels by Barnes & Noble and Chicago Review of Books. She is also the author of a bilingual (English and Slovenian) chapbook, Vizije Se Začnejo Pri Šestih (Visions Begin at Six), and is a 2021–2022 Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Prelude

Poems

By Brynne Rebele-Henry

Prelude delineates the gay female experience through a poetic reconstruction of the girlhood of Catherine of Siena, a Catholic saint who lived in 1300s Italy and disobeyed her parents by refusing marriage to devote her life to God. Through a historical lens, Brynne Rebele-Henry examines the erasure of gay women’s lives and offers a perspective of medieval queer girlhood while considering themes such as violence, desire, and the lesbian body.

Autobiography of a Wound

Poems

By Brynne Rebele-Henry

In ancient fertility carvings, artists would drill holes into the woman’s body to signify penetrability, which is the basis of Autobiography of a Wound: allowing those wounds and puncture marks to speak through the fertility figures. The wounds are chronicled through letters and poems addressed to F (F stands for the fertility carvings themselves, which are being addressed as one unified deity), and A (Aphrodite, who is being referenced as a general deity of womanhood, a figurine that reappears throughout the poems, and a symbol that is referenced or portrayed in almost every fertility figurine or carving). Autobiography of a Wound reconstructs the narrative surrounding female pathos and the idea of the hysteric girl.