body psalms by Audrey Gidman

"This is a collection of incantations, meditations, conjurings, “a bowl of water on the ground…a bowl catching grief like rainwater.” In this compact collection, the poet asks if we can make something sacred of our lives...." — Lisa C. Taylor

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Self-portrait of my body (which is a place) as a place (which is my body)

The longer I am, the more a river I become.
Which is to say: pull me under. Which is to say: I never left.
The sun becomes a part of me.
I know because I can see my own hands.
I glisten when I move. I never stop moving. I move so fast & so far
away from what doesn’t fit. I carve myself new hips.
Make the ends of me into something else. Morning
bright as a brand new edge.
Glitter-swift. All sparkle. Goodbye, beginning.
Goodbye, night. Goodbye, dark
place where grief is building me a house.
Goodbye, moon & knife & sand.
I am leaving now. It is day. I never did
what I came here to do because everything
changed. My hair grew long. I shaved it
off. & it grew back again.

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Reviews:

• The poems ... possess a gentle ferocity, a blood-and-soil connection to the spiritual. —The Boston Globe

Audrey Gidman’s debut chapbook opens with a prayer of “roots and small spaces.” This is a collection of incantations, meditations, conjurings, “a bowl of water on the ground…a bowl catching grief like rainwater”. In this compact collection, the poet asks if we can make something sacred of our lives, “…broken tower, broken hips of this land/cracking like trees in a storm before the sky lit up with prayer.” Her deep lyric awareness beckons a reader into the world of iikááh, a holy place where “gods come and go.” From memory and the honoring of earth, trees, and the body, Gidman reframes trauma, “She knows the storm/by the inside of its name.” The poet digs in the dirt, washes stones, loves fully the flawed world and its equally flawed inhabitants. As she aptly writes, “I don’t die this time. I dazzle.”

—Lisa C. Taylor, author of Interrogation of Morning and Necessary Silence

I have admired Audrey Gidman’s poetry for years. body psalms is a book of wonder, blood, and holy longing for flowers and seeds and wind and stone and their echoes in the human form. Her poems are the sound of song in the wind, music of the earth in cupped hands. They are made of the body the way prayer is made of breath. Gidman sings the rapture of the broken world made beautiful. You should listen.

—Jeffrey Thomson, author of Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory

This collection is a rarity, a ritual space incubated in the wilderness, steeped in mythic and ecstatic consciousness. Its power resides in its localities, its hard-won wisdom famed for five miles around even as it touches the cosmos rivering through it. Embowled. Blood roots nursing in the dark.

—Timothy Liu, author of Let It Ride

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Audrey Gidman is a queer poet living in Maine. Her poems can be found in Luna Luna, The Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, Volume Poetry, and elsewhere. She serves as assistant poetry editor for Gigantic Sequins and chapbooks editor for Newfound. Her chapbook, body psalms, was the recipient of the Elyse Wolf Prize.