The Body in Language: An Anthology
edited by Edwin Torres
Purchase copies here, or write to counterpath@gmail.com.
“You are holding a marvel of a compilation of writing on the mind-body continuum unlike any other. If you, like me, have ever wondered what an embodied poetics might look like, you’ll be astounded by the lucidity of these fifty-six different takes on the question. Here, thanks to Edwin Torres’s generous labor and prodigiously expansive vision, the body is beheld from all possible angles in all its multiplicity. Primal bodies and 2.0 bodies, foreign bodies, uneasy bodies, decaying bodies, colonized bodies, data-converted bodies, defiant bodies, healing bodies, soft bodies, erotic bodies, light bodies, dancing bodies, mark-making bodies, speaking bodies, shape-shifting bodies—all have inhabited these pages ecstatically. It’s your turn now to re-animate their traces.”
—Monica de la Torre, The Happy Ending
“Like a body wholly body but no such thing—because it is numerous and luminous and cool and uncontained, because it is so all over and all not in between the elements that it is elemental—The Body in Language veers unerringly in the common process of flesh, place and rhythm, which we share as touch and glance in making and unmaking. Edwin Torres collects the uncollectible, the range and arrangement of which is as much a lyric achievement as any of the poems it holds and, then, so beautifully, releases. The catastrophe of embodiment is as glorious as the gift of embodiment is terrible. What is revealed, here, is how, sometimes, we sing ourselves into another presence.
—Fred Moten, consent not to be a single being
The question of the body’s place in language has enduring significance. Is there a more equivalent imprint on the language of our life than our own bodies? The Body In Language: An Anthology collects an extraordinary range of voices—including writers, artists, performers, and healing practitioners—to present new perspectives on the body in art by exploring the body in language. The selves/cells we release in creativity embody our fundamental being. Can we activate our connective senses to better understand how others make others?
Contributors
Amanda Ackerman
Elena Alexander
Will Alexander
Bruce Andrews
Rae Armantrout
Jennifer Bartlett
Charles Bernstein
Anselm Berrigan
Jaap Blonk
Daniel Borzutzky
Mary Cappello
Elizabeth Castagna
Mona Chopra
Nancy Cohen
CAConrad
Brandon Downing
Douglas Dunn
Marcella Durand
Murray Edmond
Chris Funkhouser
Lyn Hejinian
Jen Hofer
Bob Holman
Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Jayne Fenton Keane
Noelle Kocott
Fawn Krieger
Joon Oluchi Lee
Michele Leggott
Walter K. Lew
Taylor Mali
Sandrine Marlier
Michael Merck
Jonas Mekas
Sharon Mesmer
Tracie Morris
Judd Morrissey
Romona Mukherjee
Urayoán Noel
Susan Osberg
Georgiana Peacher
Rit Premnath
Kristin Prevallet
Q aka Kyoo Lee
George Quasha
David Rothenberg
Leeny Sack
Annie Samojedney
Eleni Sikelianos
Patricia Smith
Charles Stein
Stephen Vitiello
Anne Waldman
Christine Wertheim
Chloe Wing
Lila Zemborain
Edwin Torres is the author of eight books of poetry, including XoeteoX: the infinite word object (Wave Books), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), and Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books).
The Body in Language: An Anthology
March, 2019
Edited by Edwin Torres
$39.95; 6×9
360 pgs.
ISBN 978-1-93-399672-1
Purchase copies here, or write to counterpath@gmail.com.