Quiet Armor

New poetry from Stevie Edwards, author of Sadness Workshop

Quiet Armor, the third full-length collection from poet Stevie Edwards, examines how capitalism and patriarchy impact romantic relationships and, more broadly, intimacy. Edwards considers the ways in which confessional performances of vulnerability can be coercive, whether popular culture encourages men to seek validation through sexual excess and aggression, and how we encourage women to be complicit in figurative and literal violence against other women.

Drawing on historical and mythological figures—including Medusa, Persephone, Shakespeare’s Lavinia, Saint Agatha, and Saint Christina—Edwards builds a fierce investigation into how rape culture has shaped the literary canon, academia, and the world at large. She brings readers into the quiet and intimate spaces we create despite trauma—or perhaps even because of it. Ultimately, Quiet Armor seeks to reclaim positive intimacy, showing us not only the desperate battles but also the healing embraces. All the while, these poems ask us: What does the end of rape culture look like? How do we get there?

The poems in Quiet Armor explore the shadows and nuances of one woman teetering between conventional, gendered expectations and witch/martyr/saint/goddess. These poems unfold with improvisational energy, creating an ongoing sense of a life lived, of time passing, of wisdom accrued through experience. It is difficult to write of life’s reparations, especially where love is concerned, without sentimentality—here, Edwards succeeds, and how: when we reach the end of the last poem, we feel we know the collection’s speaker intimately, and we feel—some of us, anyway—known." - Diane Suess, author of frank: sonnets

Stevie Edwards is a lecturer in the Department of English at Clemson University and poetry editor of the South Carolina Review. Her books and chapbooks include Sadness Workshop, Humanly, and Good Grief, and her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

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