Prologue

Introduction: Plain Burned Things: Attending to the Unsayable

Chapter 1: No Mark, Nothing: A Maternal Poetics of the Unsayable

Attending to Blank SpaceAttending to Blank Space: the maternal I is ontological
Sylvia Plath's Being-Saying: Mother as Shipwrecked
Plath's Surrealist Prospero
Dark Ceiling: Plath's "Child"
It is a terrible thing to be so open: Plath's Three Women
Jean Rhys's Being-Saying: Not-thinking Maternal Grief
Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight: no mark, nothing
Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark: Everything drops away
Rachel Zucker’s Being-Saying: They say less screaming

Chapter 2: You Saw Nothing: An Erotics of Witness

Perception as reaching toward
What does it mean to see?
Iconographies of the Unsayable: Writing is also not speaking
The invisible meets the felt, Or what "pricks" us
When you hear nothing: Silence is film’s Unsaying
The Touching Testimonial: Erotics as Unsayable witness
When witness is a liminal space
Caesura: Plain, Burned Things

Chapter 3: Poetic Time Machine: Translation as Interpretation of Interstitial Space

Interstitial Space: Translation as ekphrasis means translation as poetry
Attending to Omission: Translating across gaps means translating into gaps
Spacing and Pacing: What you see is not what you get
Anne Carson’s Time Machine
Eurydike’s unbracketing of Mrs. Ramsay
Behind the Transparency

Chapter 4: A Looking Through "The Glass Essay": Reaching toward absence might be seeing the Unsayable

She looks at looking through glass
"I": Awakening the reader’s attention
"She": Triangulating Women, Connections & the Barriers Between Them
"Three": The Triangulation of reach embodied
“Whacher”: Paying attention to the Unsayable
“Fumbling”: Encountering absent presences
Whacher of Heartache: Poetics of the Reach

List of Images

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index