Description:
Winner of the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize
What does it mean to be bodied in such a way that one is simultaneously weapon and target? To exist within a species tipping toward extinction? How do we navigate the landscape of our own damage, received and inflicted, in such a way as to move through individual survival and into a common joy? The gift and the trap of the human body and its attachments to this world converge and dissolve in these poems of ecstatic music, animated rage, and wild, generative hope.Brief description: Marty McConnell is the author of wine for a shotgun (EM Press, 2013) and Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop (YesYes Books, 2018). She is the co- creator of underbelly, an online magazine focused on the art and magic of poetry revision. An MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, and Indiana Review. She lives in Chicago with her wife, visual artist Lindsey Dorr-Niro.