Somatic

Sorrowing, searching, and uncompromising as she lifts the fabric of language to come closer to what language resists, Ann Keniston in Somatic unravels meaning, examining issues of dominance and shame and what it means to be “torn and then / remade.” Keniston builds upon and inhabits historical materials regarding the condition formerly known as hysteria, working with a heightened sense of the precarious, peculiar language of the body. Here the experience of absence creates the vivid sensation of presence, and the ode transforms into the elegy and the elegy into the ode. These are startling, beautiful poems, palpable with intelligence and the long reach of their author’s compassion.

—Lee Upton