Braving the Body - Nicole Callihan

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.