Cover Art: GB Kim, Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 88 pages, 6.5” X 8”
June 2015, ISBN 978-1-936919-32-1
SUCH MANEUVERS ARE PERFORMED
They call you the lucky one
death the hour of truth
dressed in your suit of light
a body is one thing
and the arms are an-
other weakness admits
the coup de grace
color means nothing to you
adjust the velvet
night tho the crowd
divides noisily to you
the amateur kneeling
in magenta at this cathedral
his run of the hand passing close
like the most spectacular
butterfly trumpet call
The Anatomist by Taryn Schwilling (PDF)
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About The Anatomist
Schwilling knows that to deny the body is also to deny the poem, that both share a lyric principle, both always able to be opened, be it for love, for harm, for sustenance, or repair.
—Dan Beachy-Quick
Corporality comes alive, comes apart, comes to mean myriad things in this stunning first collection. Focusing on the sensual through a direct appeal to our senses, Schwilling makes sound, sight, texture, and taste all vividly apparent and vibrantly important in her exploration not only of the body itself, but of the zone of meaning that radiates between them. This is a distinct voice, fully accomplished—and one we’ll be hearing a lot in the future.
—Cole Swensen
The Anatomist is a collection of lyric dissections that re-history the female body. The erotic is languaged like lace. Schwilling renders portraits variously as Venus, as saint, as butchered beast, as bee colony, as loss. The poems in this collection take the body apart, piece by piece, to remake her in her own vision. To make her desires into song.
About Taryn Schwilling
Taryn Schwilling is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Cambodia. She recently returned from a year-long lectureship in Iraq. Her work has appeared in FENCE, Colorado Review, Anti, Tupelo Quarterly, The Volta, Pinwheel, and elsewhere.
