Rewriting the Body - Paperback

by Wyatt Townley (Author)

The body is a poem we are writing with every breath, says Townley, who in her dual life has taught yoga for decades. Albert Goldbarth calls Rewriting the Body "affectingly emotional even as it's formally risky in a very smart way." Helen Houghton of the Academy says, "I don't know of anything else like this--a profound meditation, exhilarating to read, extraordinarily beautiful." H. L. Hix says, "Her poems don't feel written on the reader's body, they feel written within it."

Excerpt from the title poem

Breath everything is riding on it
under the door winter slides
its white envelope past due past due

as we move from bed to chair
and room to room our lives
sighing in the cedars

strung on backroads to this place
where we go in and out
breath by breath gravel and ice

underfoot Orion overhead

Author Biography

WYATT TOWNLEY is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on NPR, featured in US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry," and published in journals including The Paris Review, North American Review, and The Yale Review. Other books of poems include The Breathing Field, Perfectly Normal, and The Afterlives of Trees, a Kansas Notable Book and winner of the Nelson Award.