Glows like a magma vent underwater. --G. C. WALDREP 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 song--which was once thought to induce insanity--wraps itself in and around the mind Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of the 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 dysmorphic--from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud s famed patient Dora. And like expert hands placed gently on the armonica s rotating disks Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited human contact--of hands laid upon the female body of touch at times unwanted and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysteric s locked jaws. Selected by G. C. Waldrep as the winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry Dunham s stunning third collection is at once beautiful and unnerving.