The Body Ghost
Poems
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Spare, airy, exacting poems whose quietness is often at an ironic counterpoint to their fiery leftist politics.
“Promise me the rich can’t sleep,” Joseph Lease begs in The Body Ghost, offering poems as light on the page as nursery rhymes, and as powerful as prayer. Here, verse conjures up the body in pain, the body politic in collapse, and the tensile strength of the filaments that connect us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this spare, evocative collection from Lease (Testify), few things stick around for long except the body in various guises whether it's one "crammed in/ a mailbox," or "just a blue suit with bones/ sticking out." Worldly objects flitter like leaves caught in a whirlwind; some repeat including vodka, rain, moon, and the soul while others stand as witty signposts, such as "death-flavored ice-cream" or "deathberry gum." Death is the topic at hand: the death of a father, the soul, and the natural world. "Google buys the/ sun inside your name," Lease writes. The poems are painterly, evoking smears and drips, and no conclusive narrative outs itself. But rhythmically they convey an entirely different sensation, a driving beat that holds the pieces together: "we drink/ to death, we smear the sky soft wind the/ soul beneath the soul beneath the soul." Of the collection's nine sections, three are named "The Body Ghost" and most concern loss as a function of capitalism, but "Mercy" is a moving love poem in which Lease writes, "and all the words all the hands you/ dream me dream me there soft mist,/ soft kiss." Both hope and despair are evident amid Lease's music, while the ghosts hide until they're summoned.
