Description

If Body Work begins by writing desire through a belief in the stability of the physical body, this is undone in exploring symptoms of disease, new self-knowledge and rewriting one’s personal story. Because Body Work explicitly undertakes to write of a protracted and often painful period of chronic illness, these poems complicate notions of ability and disability. In spare, arresting language, Emilia Nielsen explores not only pleasure but pain, wondering how to repair a self forever changed by illness.

Published 2018, Signature Editions

99 pages