ABSTRACT
In a series of three poems, the author uses four fictional “ugly” children who are plucked from their homelands and cast in a makeshift family to be studied by anthropologists as they navigate toward adulthood and, against all odds, toward self-worth. At once achingly invisible in all the ways they wish to be seen and terrifyingly visible in all the ways they’d wish to disappear, The Four Ugliest Children in Christendom are ghosts we cannot look away from. While others recoil from the children’s “lumpy shadows” and “laddered bones,” their “throats full of whistles,” the author urges us to look, while challenging our judgments about appearance and acceptance with every line. Nothing is more true than ugly, these poems say. Voyeuristic yet sensitive, this book unravels a story of awakening, how a group of outsiders can cling to each other like interlocking gears and how they can break free.
