The body is where it all begins

Marcy Rae Henry sings so much more than the body electric; she sings a cuerpo bilingue, a body gone awry amid perimenopause, a body nevertheless moonbright and halfnaked among the sagebrush. Henry peppers the poems of this scintillating chapbook with evocative housings and tangible accoutrements: a golden scarab in Egypt, the telltale signs of downsized childhood ("dry foods, frozen fruit, / packets of vegetable soup"), the "pastel art and fake plants" of a mammogram waiting room. Henry's lyrics bridge English and Spanish like the open-ended promise of a multilingual lifespan, which is to say they are pointed and timely and yield surprising portmanteaus: "vaccine which is vacuna / in Spanish and sounds like a cow in a cradle." Her speakers confuse want for want ("quiero querer means i want to want / but could also mean i want to love") and wound (as in "tightly") for wound (as in "painful"). They traverse the planet in search of-and escaping from-lovers like time-traveling globetrotters, arriving finally in a tightly composed ekphrasis in response to Dieter Roth's Karnickelköttelkarnickel, a poem that centers around the reappearance of an ex and the summer solstice in Iceland, where the "midnight sun stayed in the sky the way a flag stays on the moon." Whether luminously celestial or seared into the heart's memory, Marcy Rae Henry reminds us that "the body is where it all begins."

-Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White: Poems

Prepare yourself, reader. These are not poems that sit still on the page. No, these poems are dancers-leaping, twisting, roaming, and firmly rooted in the body. Henry's quick-witted and effusive voice jeté's expertly between English and Spanish; surprising imagery and unexpected allusion; personal narrative and philosophical insight. Whether considering mental health, travel, rabbits, sex, mammographs, relationships, or evolution-this is a poet deeply alive in the absurdity, eroticism, and beauty of the world.

-Teresa Dzieglewicz, author of Something Small of How to See a River

Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary Latine artist born and raised in the Borderlands. She is the author of We Are Primary Colors (DoubleCross Press), dream life of night owls (Open Country Press) and red delicious (forthcoming from dancing girl press). Her manuscript death is a mariachi won the 2024 May Sarton NH Prize for Poetry and will be released in 2025. Her work appears in Salamander, Epiphany, PANK, The Southern Review, Worcester Review, Best New Poets and various other journals and has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, and first prize in Suburbia's Novel Excerpt Contest. Marcy Rae is a digital minimalist with no social media accounts and an associate editor for RHINO Poetry. marcyraehenry.com