Description:
Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today comprises two interwoven series--one of linked prose poems called "Another Letter to the Soul" and one of individual lined poems that explore the connection between anima and animal. The volume speaks to and questions the ancient concept of the soul and its contemporary manifestations, including the damaged soul, the American soul, and the blind, gagged soul of history.
Melissa Kwasny does not define the soul in traditional religious terms, but in a shamanic, perhaps ecological sense, as the part of being that continues its existence after death. The poems in "Another Letter to the Soul" point inward, addressing the human soul directly, while the individual lined poems search outward, sensing the soul in the plants, animals, rocks, waters, and winds that surround us.
Brief description: Melissa Kwasny is the author of six collections of poems, including Pictograph, Reading Novalis in Montana, and The Nine Senses, which contains a set of poems that won the Poetry Society of America's 2009 Cecil Hemley Memorial Award. A portion of Pictograph received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, judged by Ed Roberson. Kwasny also has a nonfiction book, Putting on the Dog: Animals and Our Clothing, forthcoming from Trinity University Press. She has edited multiple anthologies, including Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1950 and, with M. L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Widely published in journals and anthologies, Kwasny's work has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. She lives outside of Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains.
Review Quotes:
"In Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Kwasny explores [the soul] like she's a hundred Wallace Stevenses looking at a blackbird (if the blackbird was a soul) and the result is a book that gives 'soul' the kind of in-depth attention it's needed, in a way that feels fresh and specific and full. . . . This is a collection that butts up against the idea that the soul is a pure, untarnished entity fit only for some afterlife in a heaven away from earth. It's also a collection about human limitations. The soul portrayed here is beautiful and messy, and our perception of it can't really ever be separated from the bodies we live in."
--Erika Fredrickson "Missoula Independent"