Rewriting the Body

The body is a poem we are writing with every breath, says Townley, who in her dual life has taught yoga for decades. Albert Goldbarth calls Rewriting the Body “affectingly emotional even as it’s formally risky in a very smart way.” Helen Houghton of the Academy says, “I don’t know of anything else like this—a profound meditation, exhilarating to read, extraordinarily beautiful.” H. L. Hix says, “Her poems don’t feel written on the reader’s body, they feel written within it.”

Excerpt from the title poem

Breath       everything is riding on it
              under the door winter slides
its white envelope       past due past due

              as we move from bed to chair
and room to room       our lives 
              sighing in the cedars

strung on backroads to this place
              where we go in and out
breath by breath       gravel and ice

              underfoot       Orion overhead