WHAT the BODY REMEMBERS: Poems for Moving Image

What happens when poetry is asked to live inside ninety seconds? What the Body Remembers gathers a collection of compressed lyric poems originally written or adapted for the moving-image form-poems designed to unfold slowly through image, music, silence, and breath. On the screen, each line arrives in time. On the page, that time belongs entirely to the reader. These poems move through desire, memory, intimacy, hunger, absence, the sea, and the strange knowledge of the body. They return again and again to the tension between longing and possession, between wanting another person and allowing that person to remain wholly herself. >A tide withdraws. A shoulder remains in lamplight. A mouth refuses metaphor. Five fingers become enough to contain an entire universe. Throughout the collection, grand language is repeatedly tested against physical reality. Stars, oceans, fire, myth, and eternity are summoned-then stripped away when they prove less exact than a wrist, a pulse, a strand of hair, the warmth of a body beside another body. Some of these poems were written directly as reel poems. Others were distilled from longer works, preserving their original language while finding a new architecture through compression, rearrangement, and silence. They are not summaries of the larger poems, but apertures into them. What the Body Remembers is ultimately a book about attention: the difficult art of seeing what is actually there without trying to possess, enlarge, explain, or preserve it. These poems were once given ninety seconds. Here, they have as long as you give them.