The Body in Language: An Anthology

Editor: Edwin Torres

Publisher: Counterpath Press (2019)

Contributors: Amanda Ackerman, Elena Alexander, Will Alexander, Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Jennifer Bartlett, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Jaap Blonk, Daniel Borzutzky, Mary Cappello, Elizabeth Castagna, Mona Chopra, Nancy Cohen, CAConrad, Brandon Downing, Douglas Dunn, Marcella Durand, Murray Edmond, Chris Funkhouser, Lyn Hejinian, Jen Hofer, Bob Holman, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jayne Fenton Keane, Noelle Kocott, Fawn Krieger, Joon Oluchi Lee, Michele Leggott, Walter K. Lew, Taylor Mali, Sandrine Marlier, Michael Merck, Jonas Mekas, Sharon Mesmer, Tracie Morris, Judd Morrissey, Romona Mukherjee, Urayoán Noel, Susan Osberg, Georgiana Peacher, Rit Premnath, Kristin Prevallet, Q aka Kyoo Lee, George Quasha, David Rothenberg, Leeny Sack, Annie Samojedney, Eleni Sikelianos, Patricia Smith, Charles Stein, Stephen Vitiello, Anne Waldman, Christine Wertheim, Chloe Wing, and Lila Zemborain

The question of the body's place in language has enduring significance. Is there a more equivalent imprint on the language of our life than our own bodies? The Body in Language collects an extraordinary range of voices––including writers, artists, performers, and healing practitioners––to present new perspectives on the body in art by exploring the body in language. The selves/cells we release in creativity embody our fundamental being. Can we activate our connective senses to better understand how others make others?

"Like a body wholly body but no such thing because it is numerous and luminous and cool and uncontained, because it is so all over and all not in between the elements that it is elemental. The Body in Language veers unerringly in the common process of flesh, place and rhythm, which we share as touch and glance in making and unmaking. Edwin Torres collects the uncollectible, the range and arrangement of which is as much a lyric achievement as any of the poems it holds and, then, so beautifully, releases. The catastrophe of embodiment is as glorious as the gift of embodiment is terrible. What is revealed, here, is how, sometimes, we sing ourselves into another presence."

–Fred Moten

"You are holding a marvel of a compilation of writing on the mind-body continuum unlike any other. If you, like me, have ever wondered what an embodied poetics might look like, you'll be astounded by the lucidity of these fifty-six different takes on the question. Here, thanks to Edwin Torres's generous labor and prodigiously expansive vision, the body is beheld from all possible angles in all its multiplicity. Primal bodies and 2.0 bodies, foreign bodies, uneasy bodies, decaying bodies, colonized bodies, data-converted bodies, defiant bodies, healing bodies, soft bodies, erotic bodies, light bodies, dancing bodies, mark-making bodies, speaking bodies, shape-shifting bodies––all have inhabited these pages ecstatically. It's your turn now to re-animate their traces."

–Mónica de la Torre