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Lisa Beech Hartz - Body Taken, Häftad

Häftad, Engelska, 2027

Del i serien Juniper Prize for Poetry

Body Taken

Poems

Av Lisa Beech Hartz

289 kr

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Beskrivning
A searing exploration of young womanhood in a culture of being seen Inspired by an exhibit of vintage photographs by Francesca Woodman, whose work is often shocking in its exploration of a woman's relationship with her body in a misogynistic culture, The Body Taken combines the confessional, the ekphrastic, and the erasure of women's artistry. In a New York City gallery, Lisa Beech Hartz finds herself completely captivated and especially moved by how much the photographer's self-portraits resemble a sort of mash-up of the poet and her dearest friend in their late teens, writing: "Mirrored in girlhood / recollection / and all our fables — / all the frazzled strands / of stories / I can never braid / complete / for lack of you." These poems grieve the poet's deep youthful bond while also reflecting on each girl's family life and their shared experiences: adventurous trips into the New York of the late seventies from their suburban town; encounters with distant, heavy-drinking parents; various medical and emotional challenges; and navigating the rampant and casual misogyny of the time. Memories are punctuated with examinations and interpretations of Francesca Woodman's photographs, attempting to decipher what the artist captured about her experience of being a young woman and what it meant to live inside a young woman's body: "Francesca crouches / in her dotted dress seam- / split and gaping. Fingers / splayed across her face / she calculates her escape." The collection also includes erasures of critical responses to Woodman's work which are sometimes respectful, even reverential, and other times reinforce the fascination with her suicide and her sexuality. Using provocative imagery, this collection serves as a love letter to lost girlhood, exploring themes of identity, loss, and the female body in the world.
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Lisa Beech Hartz is the author of Bold, Marvelous, The Goldfish Window, and These Kismets. She directs the non-profit Seven Cities Writers Project, which brings writing workshops to underserved communities. She guides workshops for men and women in two city jails.

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"An engrossing, multivalent book, The Body Taken is as much an elegy for lost friendship as it is a collection of brilliant ekphrastic poems on the work of Francesca Woodman, the influential photographer who died tragically at 22. Lisa Beech Hartz explores art's transformative processes fearlessly, and through poems of intellectual clarity and emotional power, photographer and poet each emerge an Everywoman, the specificity of their images and experiences paradoxically leading to the universal."—John Hennessy, author of Exit Garden State and UMass English department faculty member "Lisa Beech Hartz writes with a language so precise the poems feel carved out of history with a spooky clarity. Hartz responds to the photographs of Francesca Woodman as a way to reclaim the existence of women who disappear even as they are present. To call these poems ekphrastic is to diminish the genius of their scope. Hartz's eye does not merely sharpen the art of Woodman's photos, it calls the photos into being and intersperses them among the poet, the poet's mother, and a girlhood friend."—Jessica Cuello, author of Yours, Creature "In these unflinching and finely wrought poems, Lisa Beech Hartz tends to the forces that burnish and diminish the body: the reveries of youth, a cancer diagnosis, love's gravity, the intimacies of grief. The emotional power of these poems is amplified by the resonant and gorgeous language. These poems are heart-rich, deftly written. Hartz is an immensely gifted poet, and this collection is remarkable."—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine "The Body Taken is haunting. In a gorgeous sequence of lyrics and erasures, Lisa Beech Hartz resurrects the mysterious life and photography of Francesca Woodman. We wander the poems and the poems wander us, asking, 'Girl. Where have you been? /Her slim arms gesture toward a half-/open door, all darkness within.' Like all the best ekphrasis, Hartz's poems not only bring art and artist to life but take us beyond them. Woodman and her spectral self-portraits converse with Hartz's own moving meditations on girlhood, coming of age, loss, illness, danger and desire. 'I find myself/parsing calamity,' the poet notes. 'What is /a woman for?' Each poem sets loose a series of ghosts and girls who appear and disappear before our eyes, unforgettable and forever out of reach."—Kirun Kapur, author of Women in the Waiting Room

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