About Bodies

heavenly, skin, lust, matter, corpus, murder,
creatures, councils, armor, labor, meat,
fitness, corporations, the dead, vessels, curves,
skeletons in the closet, prowess, flesh

A professor once told me, "All poetry is erotic violence." I think he meant that all poetry is about sex or death. Or both. I protested that many authors write about subjects that are subtler and more nuanced, though no less deeply felt or passionately expressed. What about religion, for god's sake? And what about the cliché (offered by most of my other professors) that all poetry is about poetry?

Frankly, when we chose the theme of "bodies," we fully expected to receive nothing but poetry about sex or death or both—especially death, given the current wartime climate. But as the submissions came in, my protest of years ago came back to me: there are many more ways to think about bodies than just in extremis, at the height of pleasure or the end of life. Of course there are plenty of poets and writers known for poetry about death—from the epics to ruminations on mortality to war poetry of all ages—and there are myriad of poets and writers known for their eroticism (no need to elaborate on that genre). But life, and even the version of life that we glimpse in literature, is not so black and white. Most authors write about what falls in between, the half-deaths, the failures of intimacy. We find longing, suffering, and fantasy more often than pure naked sex; we read about the fear of mortality and illness more often than death itself.

And so we are thrilled by the strange and fascinating variety of work in this year's issue: from a starving Hungarian prisoner's fantasies—not of creamy thighs but of a juicy pork chop—to a physically challenged Swiss boy's fantastic voyages of imagination; from stark Estonian poems about a man trapped and alone to a Swedish meditation on celestial bodies and our part in making the earth's music; from lemon-scented sex in an Iranian poem to a dark Czech vision of a vampire. And, most surprisingly, to the appearance of numerous creatures, from jellyfish to lobsters, butterflies to a bestiary of frisky animals.

So sit back and read what writers from 21 different countries—from Austria to Vietnam—and 17 different languages have to say about bodies.

—Olivia E. Sears, Editor