Lost Body

Terry Ehret

Terry Ehret’s first book explores her sense of estrangement from needs and desires, and often from her own body, as she struggles for identity and definition and the continual recreation of self in intimacy, in motherhood, and in language. She comes into language as if wading into a foreign element, taking the reader into myth, memory, dream, sexual desire, and her own imaginative interpretation of ancient hieroglyphic text.

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ISBN: 9781556590573

Format: Paperback

Lost Body

After “Anatomy of Love”
by Ulalume González de León
 
One less
              possible day
opening and closing. There
we awaken, about to cross over
into the province of our beloved name.
As if the danger of brandishing this body
belonged to another. We do not know
where our blood is taken,
why our eyelids throb,
whether our hands can translate
what the heart repeats, its remote
cry.
       One less possible day repeating
with our arms, our skin, our knees
and the amorous nape of the neck
what it is like to be a body.
To lie in wait, opening and closing,
crossing from this body into the only other possible.
We utter our forgotten name to one beloved,
as if to travel into that dangerous heart
were possible. As if it were possible
to be a body. As if we had never forgotten.

About the Author

Terry Ehret is a poet and teacher, and one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press. She earned a BA from Stanford University and an MA from San Francisco State University. She has published four collections of poetry: Lost Body (1993), Translations from the Human Language (2001), Lucky Break (2008), and Night Sky Journey (2011). Literary awards include the National Poetry Series, the California Book Award, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, a nomination for the Northern California Book Reviewer’s …

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Reviews

“Ehret lyrically captures the primordial concepts of man, woman, nature and dream.” —Publishers Weekly

“Terry Ehret is a wonderfully various, resourceful poet. Her play with forms works always towards ease and freedom. Her timing is faultless, a joy in itself; and her fearlessness is exhilarating.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

“Terry Ehret’s poetry is vivid, compelling, full of energy…lucid yet mysterious…I salute her achievement. Her poems are one more step for womankind.” —Carolyn Kizer

“To read [Ehret’s work] is to become invested, repeatedly… at the most serious and disquieting level of song, where one crosses over to the unfamiliar and recognizes it and is changed.” —Kathleen Fraser