THE BODY, A TREE IBD

Sinopse

&ldquo,Opening in the aftermath of a breakup, this book moves through an entire calendar year of grief and recovery before closing with poems so sensuous and raw that it is possible to believe love&rsquo,s pleasure is not merely worth but is also somehow deepened by its pain. At the book&rsquo,s heart is the body that loves another body, suffers its absence, and lives to love again. In the last poem, the speaker lies in bed with a new lover, composing a cable that reads: &lsquo,one of us will leave/I will remember my body / ached for you like no other stop.&rsquo,áThat &ldquo,stop&rdquo, ends the telegram and the book but is also a command to banish worry and allow the speaker to, as she has in all these deeply felt and sparely written poems, live in the tender, stung moment.&rdquo,~Rebecca Foust, author of Paradise Drive, winner of the Press 53 Prize for Poetryá&ldquo,Somewhere in a great library of the heart, beyond Fan Fiction for Young Comets, near the Biographies of Old Oaks, between Desire 101 and AP Capture is Amy MacLennan&rsquo,s The Body, A Tree. Look for a space where a book is missing. If it hasn&rsquo,t been checked out, then it&rsquo,s escaped on its own. It is unshelvable. You can hear it, reading itself aloud: &lsquo,Allow brevity&rsquo, it says. &lsquo,Allow sweetness. Allow smudged ink.&rsquo, With her first full-length collection, MacLennan has conjured poetry of gentle authority, at once bold and vulnerable.&rdquo,~Brendan Constantine, author of Calamity Joeá&ldquo,Taut with precision and economy, lush with the music of Eros, The Body, A Tree gives us remarkable poems of the body&mdash,sensual, strikingly sensate, fully embodied. With Amy MacLennan&rsquo,s innovative diction and memorable imagery, even the weather&mdash,that talk-worn topic&mdash,becomes newly alive. A summer afternoon storm is &lsquo,&hellip,a hurly-burly jig shaking its way/ across the valley floor&mdash,fuss, heavage,/ blinks and streaks, low bellowed tone&hellip,&rdquo, This whole book is a marvelous storm of lust and longing, anticipation and satiation. Reading these poems, I&rsquo,m both immensely satisfied and pell-mell avid to read them again.&rdquo,~Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita