About this item
Highlights
- In The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, poet Sandy Longhorn, winner of the 2014 Louise Bogan award, reveals a landscape of the body-its illness, pain, and medical treatment.
- Author(s): Sandy Longhorn
- 90 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
About the Book
"Winner of the 2014 Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence."Book Synopsis
In The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, poet Sandy Longhorn, winner of the 2014 Louise Bogan award, reveals a landscape of the body-its illness, pain, and medical treatment. Her book, a meditation on veins, arms, wolves, and the soul has a cohesive, chronological order that reads more like a story than a collection. Longhorn's lush colloquial baroque unexpectedly rearranges the language of a fragile, fevered body-handled, medicated, and managed by others- with imagery of a "cursive spine," "a lucid secret," and pairings like "symptoms/solstice." Divided into sections of "General Orders," "My Mortal Form," and "Glossary," it is an epistolary tale addressed to an unknown, Dear Madame from the perspective of a woman with an undefined illness, in an unspecific place, who has "hoarded" her scars and keeps "accurate account of rashes, wounds & spells of amnesia." Longhorn's world-building flourishes with interiority and strangeness. From sickling to refugee, the narrator grapples with predictions, "traces the outline of" her escape, and forgives while raw metaphors of a body that is a "salvaged wreck" pulse with the strength of resilience