With This Body: Poems

by  Luray Gross

Praise for With This Body: Poems

“While reading this generous new collection, I thought often of Keats and the vale of soul-making and his 'three grand materials' that act upon each other in this process: the intelligence, the human heart, and the World. While dropping none of these key threads, Gross crucially adds the body, a body full of yearning and flexibility, one that takes walks literally and dreamily, that breathes and has a pulse while taking the pulse of our age. The poems thus embody a marvelous tension between the practical and the fanciful, between intimacy and expansiveness, while reminding us that the way to the soul is through the body; there is no other door.”
     —Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Letters from Limbo

“With This Body has through lines: body connections, early life on a farm, reactions to current events and traumas, and always, the refuge of words. Many poems are reactions to poets, almost letters, and, as readers, we are always welcome in the conversation. Dedicated to 'all who have lost a child,' that child could be a younger self, as well as one lost to illness or tragic circumstance. Often the adult watches the young self, times and lives overlapping. The effect is delicate; our empathy is cajoled. Similar ideas and images keep turning up—a favorite sweater, interactions while teaching kids, figures that inhabit a recognizable world. With This Body is a house of many rooms, companionable. It’ll get into your dreams."
     —Valerie Fox, author of Insomniatic

 Please order this book through your favorite online retailer:
ISBN: 978-1-933974-56-9 / $18.00 US