"In this brief yet wholly necessary volume, Flanagan moves through brutal memory to momentary grace in the process of reckoning past and present selves. This collection utterly delimits what can be known of a body in illness and a mind wreathed in agonies of loss and reclamation, scrying new futures for the singular voice that carries us through."

    —Jordan Brynn Rice, author of Constellarium

"Victoria C. Flanagan's Glossary of Unsaid Terms explores the body, like a poem... In 'Rough Draft as Caeneus Abroad,' the speaker says, 'The mind, tethered / to the body, officiates / our mythmaking...the body is nothing / but a marionette.' These poems are full of such confrontations—with the myths society teaches us, with heritage, with cancer. Flanagan is telling a new story of the body, and these poems are pulling the strings." 

    —Laura Read, author of Dresses from the Old Country
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From the publisher: The collection grapples beautifully with the challenges of inheritance—physical, cultural, and psychic.

Series editor Melissa Crowe writes, “Flanagan's book is a coming-of-age narrative—but not the kind we've seen before. Its speaker, in their twenties and in treatment for cancer, reveals in poem after poem how hard it is to grow into one's full personhood while also engaged in an effort to survive. What's remarkable is that Flanagan never lets us believe the project of becoming is less urgent than the speaker's effort to stay alive; it's precisely this intermingling of urgencies that gives the collection its electricity and its import."