I chose Cassandra Bruner’s The Wishbone Dress first of all for the 2023 Sealey Challenge because I have been lusting over the cover ever since I first saw it some years ago over at Bull City Press. I didn’t expect to cry my way through (and apologies here to the one and only Libba Bray, whose title I am stealing) a great terrible beauty, but I did.
“Frontispiece,” through which we enter the world of The Wishbone Dress, sets the tone for what is to come: sacred mixed with profane for an ecstatic, almost holy experience, something that at times made me think of Bernini‘s Ecstasy of Santa Teresa. Bruner’s world is one in which roots tangle deep and not always kind, in which her mother and grandmother’s voices intermingle even as sleep itself can bring no relief:
“Listen: sleep is a wasp’s nest inside the mouth. / Come morning, I am doubled over // the sink, spitting stingers & wings. Each heave / a prayer for a homeland, // a recitation of the Song of Songs.”
And, dear reader, I think I started to cry right there, unless it was even earlier, as she wrote “how two milligrams of estrogen / was enough to mold Eve from a shard of bone.” (Was it awkward as fuck, trying to hide that I was crying at work? You better bet it was.)
Bruner’s world, of pain and beauty and horror and ill health, is often achingly familiar to me, so much so that I frequently had to put down the book to get my bearings. It is also about a world which is not mine, for Bruner had to fight for her womanhood. Bits and pieces of her transition story color The Wishbone Dress, though I was so caught in the ways in which Bruner’s words reflected me that I did not fully realize until I reached “When I Defended My Name in Court” and read “reciting / the deadname.”
There is some strange irony, too, that I should read this book before stumbling across transphobic hate directed at the soccer goddess Megan Rapinoe, whose work on and and off the field has done so much for all women in sports—and, really, for all women across the board.
The Wishbone Dress is beautiful and terrible and I cried when I read it and I will cry when I read it again, which I know because I’m almost crying now. It is precise and tender and expansive, the sort of beauty that is an ache under one’s skin. Perhaps the best way to summarize it is to turn to “Of the Night,” and left Bruner speak for herself:
Name us a god who is a hooker, whose laws are / be fluid & multiple, nourish one another / within reason — / We will kneel, unfurling / our perfumed nests of hair in offering.
Essentially a Nerd 