Animal Magnetism (Paperback)
Description
In Animal Magnetism, winner of the 2009 Pearl Poetry Prize, Kim Roberts delves into the mysteries, anomalies, and afflictions of the human body. While caring for a terminally ill friend, she began visiting medical museums, exploring the age-old effort to understand the body's workings and cure its maladies. But it wasn't until she faced her own illness that she began to translate what she found there into these finely-crafted, deeply personal, and historically revealing poems. From Hippocrates to the dawn of modern medicine, the arcane exhibits she encounters not only serve to remind us of how far we've come in this age of advanced medical technology, but how much further we have to go. For who among us has not experienced the betrayal of the body, whose unseen corridors still harbor the seeds of disease and disorder?
About the Author
Kim Roberts is the author of two previous books of poems, The Kimnama (Vrzhu, 2007) and The Wishbone Galaxy (WWPH, 1994). In 2000, she founded the acclaimed online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly. She is editor of the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, D.C. (Plan B, 2010), and author of a nonfiction chapbook Lip Smack: A History of Spoken Word Poetry in D.C. (Beltway Books, 2010). Ms. Roberts is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the D.C. Commission on the Arts, and the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. Individual poems of hers have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Mandarin. She has been awarded writers residencies from twelve artist colonies. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Praise for Animal Magnetism…
In Animal Magnetism, Kim Roberts investigates, in language as rich, complex, and nuanced as the body itself, the unlit interiors of physical and emotional anatomy...Borne out of the author's own deep searching following a serious illness, each poem, each line, feels deeply earned...While these poems are beautifully-made and sometimes funny or painful, they are also brimming with information...Here the narrator functions as a trained docent, leading the reader on a private tour of the wonders and curiosities that document the early explorations of medicine and anatomy, in which the inner workings of the human body were first opened to the human eye. --Debra Marquart
