Body of Render

by Felicia Zamora

Overview

Body of Render explores the internal and external impacts on our humanity when political, national, and societal decisions strip away our basic human rights. What does it mean to be an underrepresented individual in a country where the most powerful seat in the land unashamedly perpetuates racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and classist behaviors? The voices document a journey before and after the last presidential election. These poems cry out for reconsideration of our broken systems to find common and safe ground rooted in equitable treatment of each other as human beings. How do we exude love when being a person of color or underrepresented person in this country means the dominate white-male-able-bodied-heterosexual narrative continues to threaten our voices? This collection carves at the physical, the political, the intimate, and the structural with poems that simultaneously create and encourage voice to seek a path toward collective mending.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597099752
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/21/2020
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Felicia Zamora’s books include Body of Render, the 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award winner, Instrument of Gaps, & in Open, Marvel, and Of Form & Gather, the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner. A 2019 CantoMundo fellow, she won the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize and was Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, CO. Her poems appear in Academy of American Poets (Poem-A-Day), the Georgia Review, the Missouri Review (Poem of the Week), The Nation, and others. She is an editor for Colorado Review and programs manager for the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Table of Contents

At the hand of other

At the hand of other 19

In our bundle 20

In fall or other shitty metaphors for depression 21

In the light of 22

Back to quiet 23

In the name of freedom (an election thought) 24

& in burn you also 25

Election Night 26

Poem to America 27

Rise 28

Survival-three days after election 29

Comfort in knowing that mathematically you are not alone in choice of love over hate 30

Not my president 31

Fallacy Catch-22 32

In crawl out of cessation 33

In time, brave, brave 34

Restroom hug 35

What the world offers 36

Sores & Dressings: A Post Election Moment of Comfort 37

The snowman 38

Love bold 39

In the month of not-so-thankful thoughts 40

Character beyond definition 41

On words: a Thanksgiving thought 42

In the make 43

Star in burn 44

Heliocentric 45

America, ain't I a woman 46

Winterize, oh America 47

Voice witness, yes, voice 48

Raw deliberation of circumstances

This wild in which we 51

The retreat 54

In search of feminism 56

Speak, despite 58

Once you lie a lot, it's like second nature 59

Of mouth this heavenly body 60

If starlight be 61

No Apologies To America Anymore

In our nation's capital 67

Poem to America 68

In preparation for fiery climates: a poem to America 69

Poem to America 70

Loose clench 71

Mathematics of healing: a poem to America 72

Poem to America 73

What of you, child in learn 74

In our nation's capital 75

Poem to America 76

In our nation's capital or America is a poem 77

Poem to America 78

Unapologetic 79

Poem to America 80

What haunts you now 81

Poem to America 82

Infinite design of a mouth, open

A method for survival 85

Ghost of innocence 87

& in unmake, reveal 88

& of heart & home America 89

Poem for you, America 90

& in mend, we 91

Editorial Reviews

"Language is action in these poems, which are utterances of pleading, fighting, and mending in an America we can hardly stand to look at straight on.Body of Render is a book of saying what must be said: 'Capitol Hill be voice of all your people, be just/in haunt, you must be voice, must.' The risks Felicia Zamora takes with form, syntax, and breath pay off in poem after poem and makeBody of Render one of the most dynamic, most transformative collections I've read in years." —Maggie Smith, author ofGood Bones

"In 1917, NAACP organizer James Weldon Johnson wrote 'To America,' a poem in which he asked, 'How would you have us, as we are?/...Rising or falling?' And with the (unjust, Russian-influenced) election of 2016, one hundred years later we (migrants, people of color, women, queer, trans and non-binary folx, folx with disabilities, abuse survivors, and all who believe equity is true freedom) are still forced to fight for better answers than the ones America is giving. How grateful I am to hear Felicia Zamora's heart and voice rising, reminding us that "'alone is not us.' Here is a book that is part elegy, part ecstasy, part clapback, and all vision. How she zooms in on the microscopic wonder of cells only to zoom out to remind us what we are capable of. 'oh / unanswerable molecule of you; oh inorganic beast; oh / organic beast; burn down, day day, then rise.' Thank you, Felicia, for lifting us (and yourself!) up with these prayer-poems. May this book usher in freedom—simple and mighty." —TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania

“In response to the 2016 election and resulting stripping of basic human rights, Zamora penned this compelling and dynamic collection to enrage and inspire action.”—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine's list of Poetry for the Rest of Us 2020

From the Publisher