Your Body Should Be a Part of the World is AVAILABLE!
C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Awardee 2024
ABOUT
Your Body Should Be a Part of the World is a meditation on chronic illness, survival, and community that moves between the intimate space of the sickroom and the messy persistence of nature. In these lyrical and prose poems, Samuels opens the world of her body to the reader, sharing the daily vicissitudes of disabling chronic illness with vibrant attention to detail, every syllable of loss and discovery measured in her words. The body in these poems is not only that of the author, but each plant in her garden, each molecule of air shared among beloveds, each mortal person who may find themselves here in these poems of celebration and defiance.
PRAISE FOR YOUR BODY SHOULD BE A PART OF THE WORLD
“Bodies are complicated, lives are messy, and there is pain and joy both in and through the mess and complication. Are bodies to be transcended? These poems show us that bodies and lives are best lived, in all their bramble and shine. Your Body Should Be a Part of the World helps us feel the shine amid the bramble. Ellen Samuels is a crip poet to be savored; these poems pulse with life even—especially—in the toughest moments. Their honesty and their artistry mark this book as an important accomplishment.”
—Jim Ferris, Author, Slouching Toward Guantanamo
“The poems in Your Body Should Be a Part of the World by Ellen Samuels brilliantly capture the lived experience of being sick and disabled. Bodies are unruly, confounding, and inscrutable. Samuels invites us into her bodyworld sharing its infinite intimacies with us.”
—Alice Wong, Editor, Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire
“Ellen Samuels’s Your Body Should Be a Part of the World is serious business, the poetic hospital we crips (and everyone else) need right now. Arriving right on time as fascists attempt to push us right out of the world, these delicious, finely wrought poems are the wry, contemplative, complex reflection of crip realities we need and deserve, insisting on our presence and our right to be everywhere we are.”
—Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author, The Future is Disabled