Poetry. In SINGULAR BODIES, Ruth L. Schwartz, winner of the 2000 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, explores the theme of the body and its transformations-through eros, illness, disability and death. Informed and inspired by ten years of AIDS and cancer education, Schwartz offers a "numinous, deep-hearted collection [that] explores the redemptive quality of love-and it's ability to hold even the hardest facts of physical life.in its enormous arms"-Alison Luterman.
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About the Author
Ruth L. Schwartz was born in Geneva, New York in 1962, and spent her childhood and early adulthood moving around the country. She left home at 16, received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan, then made the San Francisco Bay Area her chosen home. She has also traveled extensively in Latin America, and speaks Spanish fluently. For many years, Schwartz made her living as an AIDS educator. She has taught creative writing at Cleveland State University and Goddard College, and currently teaches at California State University Fresno.
Schwartz' other books are Edgewater (Harper-Collins, 2002; National Poetry Series winner, 2001) and Accordion Breathing and Dancing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996; Associated Writing Progams Competition Winner, 1994). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Astraea Foundation for Emerging Lesbian Writers. Her poetry has won numerous national prizes, including Nimrod's Hardman/Neruda Award (twice), the Chelsea Editor's Prize (also twice), the New Letters Literary Award, the North Carolina Writer's Network Randall Jarrell Prize, and the Kalliope Sue Saniel Elkin Award.
Schwartz' poems have been anthologized in The World in Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave, American Poetry: Next Generation, The New Young American Poets, and elsewhere. In addition, she has published creative nonfiction in The Sun, the Utne Reader, and several anthologies.
About her work, Schwartz writes:
The theme of the body and its transformations - through eros, illness, disability and death - figures prominently in my work. My ten years in AIDS and cancer education, and my close personal experience with kidney failure and transplantation, have profoundly informed my writing; so has my visceral awareness of the violence and alienation so prevalent in urban American life at the close of the twentieth century. Still, my belief in joy - and in the redemptive capabilities of sexuality and love - are at the core of my poetry.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hieroglyphics on a Branch of Peach
for Shari
for Shari
Once, a woman made love to me
through the slippery dark.
Her brother was dying, her sisters were shooting
heroin in the bathroom as she moved her tongue
like sadness on my skin, and I felt
how all the sweet explosions
summer, orgasm, a ripe peach in the mouth
connect unfailingly to the barren fields.
What we have learned about love in this life
can never be removed from us.
Not one minute pried
from any of the days
and yet, there was a worm
which entered the live branch,
lived and ate and tunneled through
the wooden heart, and with its body wrote
new language
through the lost years.
So there must be another,
more convincing name for innocence,
the kind the body never lost,
the grace of stumbling
through an open door
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Singular Talent,
By A Customer
This review is from: Singular Bodies (Anhinga Prize for Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Ruth Schwartz's singular talent is to find the beauty within the broken and to celebrate the eros of the everyday, wherever she finds it. Her poems speak of greasy-winged city pigeons with bald tumors, of lovers with damaged bodies, of cities poisoned by decay--and of her love for all these things. Love, in Schwartz's universe, is the great redeemer; she insists on it, and it does not fail her, or her poetry. In these broken times, her voice is needed more urgently than ever.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Will admirably serve to introduce a major poetic talent,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Singular Bodies (Anhinga Prize for Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Ruth L. Schwartz is a singularly remarkable poetry whose work is as passionate as it is lyrical. Singular Bodies (winner of the 2000 Anhinga Prize for Poetry) will admirably serve to introduce a major poetic talent to reading public. Now The Crows Are Courting Us: cawing, spreading brilliant wings/feather by dark gleaming feather, as a lover would/if give wings; we picnic in the wild air.//before and after rain, suspended between storms,/the sparrows gathered at our feet,/the syrup taste of other countries//on the melons' flesh./Listening with such attention/to the music of each breath --//exuberant, recalcitrant,/the way life pulses shining/and demand in our hands.
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