Lost Body

by Terry Ehret

Poetry. Selected for publication in the National Poetry Series by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer, Terry Ehret's first book explores her sense of estrangement from needs and desires, and often from her own body as she struggles for identity and definition and the continual recreation of self in intimacy, in motherhood, and in language. She comes into language as if wading into a foreign elements, walking "the boundary between the dead and the silence of her ordinary life," taking the reader into myth, memory, dream, sexual desire, and in the final section, through an imaginative interpretation of an ancient hieroglyph text. If H.D. had been a language poet, she might have written something like this.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

TERRY EHRET has published several collections of poetry including Suspensions, Lost Body, and Translations from the Human Language. Literary awards include the National Poetry Series, California Book Award, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart nominations. Lucky Break, her most recent publication, has been nominated for the Independent Book Sellers Award and the Northern California Book Reviewers Award as one of the best poetry collections of 2008. She is the co-founder of Sixteen Rivers Press, a shared-work publishing collective for San Francisco Bay Area poets. From 2004-2006 she served as poet laureate of Sonoma County where she teaches writing and lives with her husband."

Reviews

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lost Body is filled with an interesting mix of poems and prose poems, the latter of which are incredibly strong--interesting for how they use the sentence to generate rhythms and propel us down the page. The movement between the two types of pieces really demonstrate the potential differences between the two, and give the book a formal sense of the dualities it seems to engage: the the past and present, myth and reality, the body and the spirit.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a collection of poems and some experimental prose poems. The experimental quality didn't really work for me, although maybe it would work well for others. There was some good stuff and other stuff that just didn't move me. Maybe 2 and a half stars.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 E335b 1992