Kathryn Crowcroft’s poetic meditation on the tongue explores violence and silence within families

A book across genres

Tongue is Crowcroft’s debut book, shaped by thinking and observations that grew from her doctorate. She had previously published scholarly articles, poems and reviews. The book combines nonfiction and memoir in a “nodal essay,” a series of fragments rather than a conventional linear narrative. Personal memories sit alongside archival quotations and brief scenes involving colleagues Florian, Rowan and Dora, who are presented without backstories or identifying features.

The tongue as subject

The tongue provides one of the book’s central threads. Crowcroft moves between clinical and lyrical descriptions of its qualities, composition and function, drawing on images from medical texts dating from medieval times and later periods.

The organ enables speech, allowing people to make poetry, stories and lies. Crowcroft’s research also presents it as morally complicated: speech can express compassion and sacred ideas, but it can also convey cruelty, misogyny, racism and hatred.

Family history and violence

Crowcroft writes about her mother, her late father and the continuing effect of his life on both women. The mother and daughter have not resolved their relationship to the man, whose violence is referred to throughout the book.

Silence, truth and lies

The mother’s reluctance to acknowledge the violence conflicts with Crowcroft’s insistence that it be spoken. The book presents this tension as a source of what Crowcroft calls “lies,” returning the reader to the tongue as an instrument of both truth and mendacity.

Mother and daughter communicate mostly through short text messages. The mother signs off with LOL, meaning “lots of love,” while Crowcroft understands it as “laugh out loud”; in the account, laughter seems more connected to irony than to joy.