The Certain Body (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781954245303)

In the long limbo of post-viral syndrome, Julia Guez aptly frames the recursive paralysis of pandemic rhetoric, whose seeming transitions always arrive at the same uncertainty: "and then what / and then / what, what / then." The Certain Body captures life with illness-how the body moves through disease and rests in the liminal space of otherness. Following the speaker through a harrowing and disorienting SARS-Cov-2 infection, readers witness the poet's gradual refortification as Guez traverses all facets of sickness: its mercies, its pleasures, its gratitudes, its reliefs, its gorgeousnesses. Probing, sharp poems centering an awareness of human ephemerality answer the words of Viktor Shklovsky: "And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony." In "If Indeed I Am Ill," Guez writes, "These sonatas, these scores, tell me / what of them will last when everything falls away-" Through these lyric expressions, Guez shows us not just how art can heal but how healing is art, a modality of acceptance, the meaning in the process, a mosaic of imperfections that creates and embraces what is.

Author: Julia Guez
ISBN-10: 1954245300
ISBN-13: 9781954245303
Publisher: Four Way Books
Language: English
Published: 09/15/2022
Pages: 64
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.82h x 5.83w x 0.24d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/15/2022