Customer Reviews

Dance From Inside My Bones

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"Dance From Inside My Bones" is a lovely debut full-length collection of poems from Lana Hechtman Ayers (who published her chapbook "Love Is a Weed" in 2006). "Tonight, I want to be that little girl again / the day before life got hard. / If I could have, I would have learned how / to dance from inside my bones" she writes. And although many of the poems in this collection do explore the ways that life got hard, they also dance in celebration of surviving, witnessing, loving the body we live in, and honoring memories of those beloved to us. Early poems in the book's arrangement explore childhood, solitude, and loss. "Traife" astonished me with its articulate bravery, weaving together a girl's awareness of her Jewish identity with the narrative of her sexual vulnerability. Lana Hechtman Ayers writes powerfully of women's bodies; one beautiful instance of this comes in "While the Bathtub Is Filling," as the speaker assesses her own aging while recalling her mother's mastectomy scar: "It looked as if a red snake slithered / out of her heart and hid his head / in the brush of her armpit. / The longer I stared, the more I recognized / the creature above her belly for what it was: life. / Nothing about nakedness was ever that lovely. / My mother's survived this halving, / that scar, a red brooch of honor / making me proud to be a woman like her." Many poems here record the halving of various forms of loss--including separation and divorce, which are written with passion, grief, and humor. The poem "Newly Single" begins "I never imagined of everything I left behind, / I'd miss that old GE refrigerator." One of my favorites, "You Bring Out," comes right out of the gate with a fantastic tone: "you bring out the homicidal / bitch in me / the reverse phone number look-up in me / you bring out the feel for receipts / under the front seat of the car in me." Lana Hechtman Ayers brings out our compassion, our tenderness, our respect for good poetry.