
paper • 64 pages • $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-954245-30-3
eISBN: 978-1-954245-38-9
September 2022 • Poetry
The Certain Body
Julia Guez
Reviewed in Publishers Weekly
Reviewed by Poetry Foundation
Reviewed in RHINO Poetry
Reviewed in Hyperallergic
In the long limbo of post-viral syndrome, Julia Guez aptly frames the recursive paralysis of pandemic rhetoric, whose seeming transitions always arrive at the same uncertainty: “and then what / and then / what, what / then.” The Certain Body captures life with illness—how the body moves through disease and rests in the liminal space of otherness. Following the speaker through a harrowing and disorienting SARS-Cov-2 infection, readers witness the poet’s gradual refortification as Guez traverses all facets of sickness: its mercies, its pleasures, its gratitudes, its reliefs, its gorgeousnesses. Probing, sharp poems centering an awareness of human ephemerality answer the words of Viktor Shklovsky: “And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” In “If Indeed I Am Ill,” Guez writes, “These sonatas, these scores, tell me / what of them will last when everything falls away—” Through these lyric expressions, Guez shows us not just how art can heal but how healing is art, a modality of acceptance, the meaning in the process, a mosaic of imperfections that creates and embraces what is.
“Meditation at Callicoon,” from The Certain Body
More and more night pretends
it isn’t spring. What to
make of the daffodils then?
Hyacinth here and there, wind
and rain? So many birds.
Of course they won’t stay
long. None of this will.
Not the night, the cold,
the city full of swallows.
Not the bridges and rivers,
the music that they make.
Not the sea, no god
born of the sea foam.
Not even mothers and sons
this would be unbearable without.
About the Author