Embouchure

An embouchure is the way in which a wind musician applies their mouth to an instrument's mouthpiece, and Embouchure, Emilia Phillips's fourth poetry collection, sets its mouth, ready to play. Trumpeting a picaresque coming out story, the poems are at turns self-deprecatory and revelatory, exploring sexual fluidity and non-monosexuality. From the speaker's adolescent crushes to her closeted 20s to her eventual acceptance of queerness, her disarming joy-even at her own mistakes-is cut with challenges to toxic masculinity and reckonings with anticipatory anxiety. The tomboy the speaker once was is transfigured into 'a presexual soft butch / Medusa' with a 'beautiful, beautiful / body that didn't know yet // how to contain itself.' Elsewhere, the speaker evades a Dickinsonian personification of Death, who seems more like an inescapable ex-boyfriend than a welcome bridegroom. Phillips's mock-confessionalism is as brassy as it is vulnerable.