Braving the Body

By: Nicole Callihan and Pichchenda Bao and Jennifer Franklin

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Synopsis: It is only through the body that we receive images, and mostly through the images that we receive poems. Braving the Body is a collection of these fierce images; of 116 bodies; of, as Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass, “head, neck, hair, ears . . . mouth, tongue, lips . . . bowels sweet and clean . . . brain in its folds inside the skull frame . . . heart valves”; of Liza Katz Duncan’s 10-week pregnant body driving south; of Diane Seuss’s hair “the color of a field mouse” and Justin Wymer’s “pill the color of her hair”; of the cast made of Drew Skelton’s teeth; the discarded membranes of Fia Montero’s “Diastasis Recti Abdominis”; the imagined daffodils planted by “our children’s children” of Ann Fisher-Wirth’s final consummation with her beloved. Absurd, sublime, anxious, and tender—these poems resonate in the very place they were born—the brave body in all its gore and glory.