Rewriting the Body

The body is a poem we are writing with every breath, says Townley, who in her dual life has taught yoga for decades. Albert Goldbarth calls Rewriting the Body "affectingly emotional even as it's formally risky in a very smart way." Helen Houghton of the Academy says, "I don't know of anything else like this--a profound meditation, exhilarating to read, extraordinarily beautiful." H. L. Hix says, "Her poems don't feel written on the reader's body, they feel written within it."

Excerpt from the title poem

Breath everything is riding on it

under the door winter slides

its white envelope past due past due

as we move from bed to chair

and room to room our lives

sighing in the cedars

strung on backroads to this place

where we go in and out

breath by breath gravel and ice

underfoot Orion overhead