the body is where it all begins

<p>Marcy Rae Henry sings so much more than the body electric; she sings a cuerpo bilingue a body gone awry amid perimenopause a body nevertheless moonbright and halfnaked among the sagebrush. Henry peppers the poems of this scintillating chapbook with evocative housings and tangible accoutrements: a golden scarab in Egypt the telltale signs of downsized childhood (dry foods frozen fruit / packets of vegetable soup) the pastel art and fake plants of a mammogram waiting room. Henry's lyrics bridge English and Spanish like the open-ended promise of a multilingual lifespan which is to say they are pointed and timely and yield surprising portmanteaus: vaccine which is vacuna / in Spanish and sounds like a cow in a cradle. Her speakers confuse want for want <em>(quiero querer </em>means i want to want / but could also mean i want to love) and wound (as in tightly) for wound (as in painful). They traverse the planet in search of-and escaping from-lovers like time-traveling globetrotters arriving finally in a tightly composed ekphrasis in response to Dieter Roth's <em>Karnickelköttelkarnickel </em>a poem that centers around the reappearance of an ex and the summer solstice in Iceland where the midnight sun stayed in the sky the way a flag stays on the moon. Whether luminously celestial or seared into the heart's memory Marcy Rae Henry reminds us that the body is where it all begins.</p><p></p><p>-Diego Báez author of<em> Yaguareté White: Poems</em></p><p></p><p></p><p>Prepare yourself reader. These are not poems that sit still on the page. No these poems are dancers-leaping twisting roaming and firmly rooted in the body. Henry's quick-witted and effusive voice jeté's expertly between English and Spanish; surprising imagery and unexpected allusion; personal narrative and philosophical insight. Whether considering mental health travel rabbits sex mammographs relationships or evolution-this is a poet deeply alive in the absurdity eroticism and beauty of the world.</p><p></p><p>-Teresa Dzieglewicz author of <em>Something Small of How to See a River</em></p>