Dangerous Bodies

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 a family gone wrong. Out of abandonment and incest, the wounded child turns to the long building of a self she can rightfully claim as her own.

Knowing that "Closeness and distance / are all that we can be sure of", Warren successfully 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, Warren finds 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, she shows us how we, too, can more fully anchor ourselves in a fundamentally nourishing reality.