Lost Body (National Poetry Series Books)

Poetry. Selected for publication in the National Poetry Series by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer, 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 elements, walking "the boundary between the dead and the silence of her ordinary life," taking the reader into myth, memory, dream, sexual desire, and in the final section, through an imaginative interpretation of an ancient hieroglyph text. If H.D. had been a language poet, she might have written something like this.

Terry Ehret is a poet and teacher, as well as one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press, a nonprofit, shared-work publishing collective representing poets of the San Francisco Bay Area watershed. She has published three collections: Lost Body (1993), Translations from the Human Language (2001), and most recently Lucky Break (2008). Literary awards include the National Poetry Series, the Commonwealth Club of California Book Award, and the Nimrod/ Hardman Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. In 1997, as the writer-on-site at the Oakland Museum of California, she created a poetry audio tour for the Gallery of California Art; and from 2004-2006, she served as Sonoma County Poet Laureate. She has taught writing at San Francisco State and Sonoma State Universities, California College of the Arts, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with the California Poets in the Schools Program. She currently leads private workshops in Sonoma County, California, where she lives with her family.