Description: With language flush with and supercharged by Eros, Carey Salerno's third book is a poet's elegy to her uterus, her love letter penned in an overcrowded room to autonomy and desire. Having been debilitated and rendered infertile by endometriosis, endured rounds of infertility treatments that landed her in miscarriage and selective reduction treatments, and suffered a cancer scare that left her body incapable of conceiving, Carey Salerno responds with these maximalist poems. Through them, she dives headfirst into the world with an intense hunger to live to the fullest, to release the shame the she has amassed about her own body and its refusals to function, reflecting on and redefining what it means to be a woman when so much is taken from her.
Brief description:
Carey Salerno is the author of three books of poetry, The Hungriest Stars, Tributary, and Shelter. Her poems have appeared widely in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She is the Executive Director and Publisher of Alice James Books.
Review Quotes: "Carey Salerno's work here is fertile with ingenious precision and song-like longing. She goes deep into the most brutal systems (productive, reproductive, social, ideological) and finds a rhythm to try to work it all through her own system, to understand. These poems circle the cycles, experience the imagined, and suffuse uncertainty with sustaining love. These poems, for all their recognition of pain and alienation, also somehow remember that each breathing moment contains itself, always, and there is some deep, strange comfort there. What a beautiful, heartbreaking, brilliant book."--Brenda Shaughnessy