The Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds Rising)

Let no lip, shoulder, hip, go untasted tonight. Let no one be unscathed. 
And as you close the door & fold yourself in sleep against another

look for a moment at the empty stretch of dark between heaven
& earth: someone is missing from the world . . . 

The Body Distances is filled with long, limber, nimble poems at once ecstatic and elegiac. These poems are odes to the miraculous embedded in the everyday, in which “the unlikely continues / to dovetail with the present.”

MARK WAGENAAR is a doctoral fellow at the University of North Texas in Denton. He is the 2014 winner of the Pinch Poetry Award, the New Letters Poetry Prize, and the Mary C. Mohr Poetry Prize, as well as the 2013 winner of the James Wright Poetry Prize, the Poetry International Prize, and the Yellowwood Poetry Prize. Wagenaar served as the University of Mississippi's 2014 Summer Poet in Residence. His debut manuscript, Voodoo Inverso, was the 2012 winner of the Felix Pollak Prize. His poems have been published or accepted by the New Yorker, 32 Poems, Field, Image, Subtropics, Ninth Letter, Washington Square, Shenandoah, and the Missouri Review.