Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
With deceptively pellucid language, Dangerous Bodies offers, in poem after poem, precise, jewel-like crystallizations of understanding that illuminate the craggy and often harrowing emotional terrain of afamilygone wrong.Out of abandonmentand incest, the wounded child turns tothe long building of aselfshe canrightfullyclaim as her own.
Knowing that "Closeness and distance / are all that we can be sure of,"Warrensuccessfully navigates the road from indictment of her father "All your life you were generous and ruined, / and you took us with you." to the astonishingly merciful "It s no one s fault, this life."
In meeting up with a small shorebird that regularly travels 20,000 miles a year from Africa to Alaska and the Arctic, Warrenfinds a perfect analog to her own poems: "song precariously perched; witness / against the barrens of space." Through lovingly learning the names and life patterns of creatures and plants native to her part of the world, sheshows us how we, too, can more fully anchor ourselves in a fundamentally nourishing reality."