The eighteenth-century glass armonica, a musical instrument whose sound emits from rotating water-filled vessels, has long held the power to mesmerize with its hauntingly sorrowful tones. Just as its songwhich was once thought to induce insanitywraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voices of historical female hysterics and inciting in readers a tranquil unease. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphicfrom Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freuds famed patient Dora. And like expert hands placed gently on the armonicas rotating disks, Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited human contactof hands laid upon the female body, of touch at times unwanted, and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysterics locked jaws. Winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Dunhams stunning third collection is lush yet septic (G.C. Waldrep), at once beautiful and unnerving.