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I am delighted to announce a new book/e-book from Moria and the wonderful Bill Allegrezza. *(em)bodied bliss. *You may order a copy or download the e-book here: http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html Engagements with the United States’ torture and abuse of prisoners, *(em)bodied bliss* juxtaposes that violence with parallel engagements with place and the sacred figured as delight/love, acutely dichotomous experiences of body. Against the desire to forget, to obliterate complicity and brutality, the poems of place and engagements with the sacred tender a path out of horror into empathy and obligation. In a destabilized intersection of voices, dialogues occur over and against each other, at times wholly ignorant of each other, at others desperately seeking flight. The poems articulate a territory whose boundaries become permeable, unfixed, go missing: horror/beauty, fear/delight, punishment/eros. Who speaks and to what purpose? What are the implications of speech? Of action? Of the neglect of either? Against the quotidian pleasures of being – of place, culture, connectedness – is juxtaposed the fact of torture. The poems interrogate complicity: the silence, ignorance, and fear into which we have fallen, affording the translation of the untenable – torture – into the more palatable euphemisms of “stress positions” and “water boarding”. What we see and what we fail to see: delight lifting into wonder, terror embracing infamy. I hope you'll take a gander at the free e-book. I would love to hear your thoughts. If you would like a review copy, let me know back-channel: [log in to unmask] warmly, Marthe -- Marthe Reed Director of Creative Writing Assistant Professor English Department UL Lafayette 337-482-5503 [log in to unmask] http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mxr5675/home.html http://www.blackradishbooks.org/Reed.html _____________________________________ * Poetry is made in a bed like love* *Its rumpled sheets are the dawn of things* *Poetry is made in the woods* --Andre Breton, "On the road to San Romano"