In a Body - Paperback

by Emily Hockaday (Author)

The poems in In a Body will take you to Fire Island dunes, Jamaica Bay marshes, inside a glacial moraine, and beneath the forest to the mycorrhizal network. Emily Hockaday's speaker is as likely to be pouring alcohol down a drain as inspecting horseshoe crab eggs with her child. With her, we learn to be still and to look at the micro. We walk the line between "tame/and not tame." Through a feminist and ecopoetic lens, Hockaday considers the ecosystem of the ill body contrasted with the ecosystems around us. In addition to themes of ecology and chronic pain, this collection touches on parenting, grief, sobriety, and the urban environment. How do chronic fatigue and pain isolate a person? Can nature provide connection in the face of this isolation? These are questions In a Body strives to answer. This collection looks to plant, fungal, animal, and geological bodies as a way of trying to understand humanity's place in the Universe while also grappling with chronic illness.