The Work of the Body

Poetry. "Jill Koren's poems beautifully explore how we come to know our deeper selves and 'a blood-and-lust music [that] refuses to be contained.' The desire to hear these deeper rhythms lies both in the body and in a branching out into the larger body of family (parents, grandparents, her spouse and children) and the world. However, family for her inhabits a dual role—rendered, quite beautifully, as itself but also as a powerful vehicle for the poet's inner journey. The pain of being human becomes a beautiful wound that simultaneously offers redemption, for as Koren says, 'to dab at whatever hurt me, / wipe away whatever blood bloomed from my broken skin.' Just as Muriel Rukeyser says the body must break on its movement toward wholeness, Koren—in these touchingly human poems—gives us both the blood and its bloom."—George Kalamaras