REWRITING THE BODY

Poems by Wyatt Townley • Stephen F. Austin State University Press The body is a poem we rewrite with every breath.

Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita Wyatt Townley, who in her dual life has taught yoga for decades, explores the body as place—as home—leading us from room to room, from trauma to revelation.

Here is kinetic wordplay in a range of forms—free verse to pattern poem to villanelle, anchored by the long title poem at the end. While elegiac, the book is salted through with humor and lands squarely on the side of life.

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Reviews | Comments

"I don’t know anything else like this—a profound meditation, exhilarating to read, extraordinarily beautiful, first to last."

—Helen Houghton, academy of american poets

"Very fine…affectingly emotional even as it’s formally risky in a very smart way."

—Albert Goldbarth

"Wyatt Townley knows the body—its beauty, trespasses, betrayals, and joys. With humor, passion, and enviable craft, she gives us new ways to think about our own bodies, our own places in the universe…A brilliant interplay of theater and poetry."

—Jo McDougall, poet laureate of arkansas

"I have reveled in the music of ‘Rewriting the Body,’ its lineation, the verbal excitement, its landscape and dreamscapes, flashbacks to childhood, the motions of time—only a dancer could have written this tribute to the body. Brava!"

—Colette Inez

"Her poems don’t feel written on the reader’s body, they feel written within it."

—H. L. Hix

"This stunning new collection is a triumph in its obvious display of Townley’s stark capability as a poet and reaches the deeper and greater truths, somatic memories dormant just beneath the muscle."

—Bridget Lowe