The Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds Rising)

by Mark Wagenaar

Let no lip, shoulder, hip, go untasted tonight. Let no one be unscathed.
And as you close the door & fold yourself in sleep against another

look for a moment at the empty stretch of dark between heaven
& someone is missing from the world . . .

The Body Distances is filled with long, limber, nimble poems at once ecstatic and elegiac. These poems are odes to the miraculous embedded in the everyday, in which "the unlikely continues / to dovetail with the present."

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published March 18, 2016

Reviews

[Denton · Rating 5 out of 5]

from A Brief Report on Cosmology, Fate & Human Frailty

"The dead are annealed, buried
the way a blacksmith buries a hot blade in sand. And everything is a spark,
body & petal & waterdrop, struck sparks, we are struck against the flint of our frailty,
we are flashes in the spark plugs, the world an engine in a black car Heaven rides to the edge."

[Summers Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems sing in baritone