Overview

"This body was never made is a meditation on grief and its attendant fears surrounding the body - the body's frailty, lineage, and legacy. Its poems paint portraits of maternal loss, of a fractured family, of nature's eloquence, and of transcendental beauty. While This body was never made does not solve the problem of death, it embraces the ""night sounds"" that accompany an awareness of the body's temporality, resolving in the chapbook's final lines, ""There is nothing in this room but shapes of us-amorphous/organs ascending and descending underneath the bed sheets."" In this collection, still-life speaks, seascapes listen, and math provides counsel, reminding us that life exists before and beyond the body."

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Reviews

"Cerebral, lyrical, witty, loving and grief-worn, Tara Propper's life-infusing poems in the collection, This body was never made, reveal an immense talent, a rare gift to the world of poetry. In a sky of many, Propper is singular. The poem ""Seascape at 4:42 PM"" concludes: ""One chiseled cloud makes a metonymy/ of itself. Cotton mammals lurk above/ both pure and untrue. /4:43 PM drops/its un-blessings. It's the ugliest of day-/and most aware."" Propper's poems are sinuous tracings that unnerve the tick of the clock; a lot happens between 4:42 PM and 4:43 PM, a lot that is ""most aware."" -Star Black, author of three books of sonnets: Waterworn, Balefire, and Ghostwood; a collection of double-sestinas, Double Time; and a book of collaged free verse, October for Idas Tara Propper's This body was never made tests the precision and range of mathematical concepts in particular and, more broadly, any intellectual construct we use to understand the stunning input of our senses. Can a fractal describe a pregnant female body? A miscarriage? Rage? Death? This body was never made also tests the language with which we express these concepts, using rhymes, chimes, puns and syntactical play to push words to their limits: ""Outnumbered, she let the numb root."" The raw power of these poems comes from the pressure they are under to bridge the rational and the anything but. -Julie Sheehan, author of Orient Point and Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise and Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University, NY"

Author Information

Tara Propper has earned her MFA in poetry and PhD in English. Her poetry has appeared in the Southampton Review, Janus Unbound, Literature Today, Ekstasis Magazine, Shuili Magazine, Taj Mahal International Literary Journal, Moveable Type, Vagabond City Press, and P-Queue. Her scholarly work has been published in Composition Forum, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, and Resources for American Literary Study. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Literature and Languages at the University of Texas at Tyler.

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