We Live in Bodies [Paperback]

Ellen Dore Watson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2002

"You will close this book exhilarated by its quirky, passionate poems and grateful for its huge heart fired and fed by a prodigious imagination. This is brilliant, urgent work."—Thomas Lux

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ellen Dore Watson writes a poetry of elegy. The poems in her first book, We Live in Bodies, seek consolation for all the losses that diminish the human body, the loss of life, the trauma of violence, even the slow degeneration brought on by age. With dazzling turns of phrase, her poems embody a speaker who, caught in the convulsive futility of grief, attempts to preserve at least the memory of what she's lost, in this case, a miscarried fetus:

"after you became a matter of blessed fact, a euphoric / knot of nausea I sat hugging, grinning my goofy / we beat the odds grin to have you dead in there."

Like Larry Rivers with his painting for the book's cover, Me in a Rectangle, Watson both laments and celebrates the spirit housed in the body, trapped within walls, or made manifest by shape and form. With an unabashed sense of verve and humor ("Love even forbidden love doesn't deserve linoleum"), these poems struggle against the lassitude and consequence of loss and refuse to accept old-age misrepresentations of the body...

In the tradition of Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric" and the nineteenth-century physiological movement that called for the candid recognition of both male and female bodily functions, Watson like the Brazilian poet Adlia Prado, whom she has translated sounds this timeless affirmation. "We live in bodies clumsy and disobedient," the book's title poem declares, "and we love them even as we punish with too much or too little." In poem after poem in We Live in Bodies, "words hover fleshless in vowels and consonants" and, despite the persistence of bodily loss and suffering, bid us to drink from the "cup of having to go on." -- Marcus Cafaga, Ploughshares, Spring 1998

"Ellen Watson is an eloquent, passionate poet; generosity of imagination distinguishes both her gift for language and her emotional sympathy: interrogative, tender, wildy inventive, with the wonder of childhood and a grown woman's comic sense. And her work has the quality of movement. Watson's poetry is the real thing." -- Robert Pinsky

"These poems of talent reveal the strange and hidden beauty of the body, and show us how, as both landscape and vehicle, it can drive us deep into our truest selves." -- Dorianne Laux

12 May 1996
American Train
Anything But Empty
Battered Toddler, Page B6
Beauty, Aching
The Body Speaks
Broken Railings
Circa 1970
Common Crows
Dream Tales From The Barn
E = Mc2
The Edge Of The Wild
The Egg
Emboldened By Love
The Feather
Funny How
Glen Cove, 1957
Gone Fishin'
Great Blue
A Hotel By Any Other Name
How Animals Do It
Hungry For Them
Inevitable Postcards
Innocence And Air
It Will Take How Long
Liza
The Long Road Of Knowing
Mama What's A Gulf
May At The Agway
Monday Morning Paper
Natural Light
Now That The Fields
On The Seventh Anniversary Of The Conception Of First Child
Once
The Ones
The Promise Dance
Sleep With The Face Of An Axe
Tenderness
Volunteer
Wafer
Wafer
We Live In Bodies
What Gets Left Out Of History Books
What The Body Knows
Where The Dead Live
World Greater Than We Make
Yolk
You Know Who You Are
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Alice James Books; First Edition edition (July 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1882295129
• ISBN-13: 978-1882295128
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,708,107 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars She speaks to the soul with words that are electric!, May 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: We Live in Bodies (Paperback)

The words speak directly to your soul regardless of gender - even though it's power for women is quite evident.....

5.0 out of 5 stars A MASTERPIECE!, June 26, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: We Live in Bodies (Paperback)

Great book wonderful words