My Body: New and Selected Poems

Hanging Loose Press, 2007
ISBN 9781931236744

My Body: New and Selected Poems, winner of The Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award, is Joan’s first book since the 1997 Lambda Award-winning Cold River. My Body includes substantial selections from previous books and more than 40 new poems. Order My Body from your local bookseller or online from Hanging Loose Press or Small Press Distribution.

Praise for My Body:

“Over the decades of writing, Joan Larkin has proved her mastery, whether the poem is mythic, elegiac, or biographical.  Her honesty is overwhelming, but it is coupled with poetic cunning, gorgeous language and a rhythm and tone so precise and appropriate that it is—as in the great poets—transparent.  There are no tricks and no evasive moves, nothing that in ten years she will be ashamed of or confused by.  She is a poet of compassion and pity.  Where it is appropriate, she is merciless, especially to herself.  I love reading her poems; I love reading them over and over.  I salute her.”  
           —Gerald Stern

“Joan Larkin’s high-wire poetic acts unite both electric tension and steadfast balance.  Deft, probing language surges in these poems, to the music of free verse, metric invention, high rhetoric, & demotic wit.  She needs all these, to reach the full range of felt life she intends for us.”  
           —Marie Ponsot

“Joan Larkin knows how to write a crown of sonnets so vividly revelatory that it gave this reader goosebumps.  Deaths from AIDS, family deaths, a suicide—dark subjects deftly and honorably portrayed.”  
           —Maxine Kumin

Reviews of My Body:

“For nearly 40 years, Joan Larkin has written poems that stake out a territory of relentless self-examination, taking on love and death, family and sexuality in a voice that is unsentimental, ruthless and clear-eyed. Born in 1939, she is of a generation of women who often subjugated their truer selves to social expectation; that tension, which culminated in her coming out as a lesbian, is fundamental to her work.

Larkin is also a recovering alcoholic, and her poems about this experience are among the finest ever written on the subject — the testimony, without cant or doctrine, of someone who has survived. For her, poetry is a form of witness; she offers no false hopes, no resolutions, except to reflect, as honestly and directly as she can manage, the complicated, at times uncontrollable, messiness of being alive.

My Body: New and Selected Poems gathers generous samplings from Larkin's three previous collections, as well as a substantial array of new material. It's a remarkable statement, tracing the evolution of a poet from her earliest efforts ("My mother gave me a bitter tongue. / My father gave me a turned back," she begins "Rhyme of My Inheritance") to the stunning sweep and simplicity of her current work.

I'm older than my father when he turned / bright gold and left his body with its used-up liver / in the Faulkner Hospital, Jamaica Plain," Larkin writes in "Afterlife."

Best of all is the transcendent "Blackout Sonnets," a sonnet crown (seven linked sonnets, joined by repeating first and last lines), which originally appeared in her 1986 book, "A Long Sound.” "I drank anything and slept with everyone," she acknowledges, "and kept my mouth shut about the abortion."

This is poetry without pity, in which despair leads not to degradation but to a kind of grace.”
          —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"There are few poets in America who can combine Joan Larkin’s formal mastery with her emotional intensity, and so it has been something of a mystery to me why she’s not better known or more widely valued as one of the finest poets in America. Unlike so many poets who lose emotional force as they get older, Larkin grows stronger as time goes on. The new poems in this volume are by far the best she has written. Perhaps Larkin’s failure to win a wider audience is the result of her tackling for many years a subject that men would like to claim as their own—alcoholism. If you put Franz Wright’s poems of drunkenness beside Larkin’s, it’s perfectly obvious who has written the better work. Yet Wright gets published by Farrar Straus and Larkin by Hanging Loose Press. But I think Larkin’s limited recognition also derives from something else: Larkin gives no place for the reader to hide, no easy consolations to cheer you up no matter how bleak things are. And things are bleak—but also joyous and mysterious—and you’d better get used to it and pay attention so that you can see that “Heaven is fire, too.” Unlike so may AA veterans, Larkin retains no belief in a higher power. As she writes in “Tough-Love Muse,” “Praise grief all you want,/More loss is coming.” But Larkin deserves no more loss. The arrival of the recognition she deserves should be on the way."
           —David Bergman, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide

“In a youth-addicted culture, it is a pleasure to read the work of grown women. Having recently arrived (full disclosure) at threescore years and ten, I find myself less often surging to read prizewinning first novels and books of poems by brilliant young authors, and more inclined to see what maturity has to say. Women’s wisdom, as well as artistic finesse, is what I seek nowadays in poetry. In particular, poets who prove themselves able to face the worst, in the body politic and the body, and to survive unsubdued, win my gratitude. Here are two such poets. . . .

Reading the new poems in Joan Larkin’s My Body, you will find yourself thinking you’d like this poet as a friend. Scene after scene, whether she is writing of her daughter’s birth, or a man’s ecstatic testimony at an AA meeting, or the AIDS deaths of friends, or poignant memories of parents, or aging kin, or “faking boredom” as a high school girl starting to be a serious drinker and watching “as Ella in a black gown landed exactly/ on each note of From This Moment On,” or being beaten by her mother, or abortion, or hot sex, or cold sex, or demonstrating at a presidential inauguration while the black Stetsons and draped minks sneer by, “faces smooth and satisfied/ The bullies’ feast was beginning”—every poem is a document of awesomely generous attention and care. Here in its entirety is a poem entitled “The Atheists,” near the end of a gritty sequence about the poet’s brother and his dying wife. Eight lines seem to suggest the whole story of four characters:

I surprised myself calling the priest Father.
He was 5’5”, thin hair combed slant.
He leaned on the syllable us in Jesus
and smiled and nodded through the tapes I played,
Ave Verum corpus and the dead woman singing a lullaby.
And Donald took the brass cross that had touched her coffin
and hung it over his bed for comfort,
choking tears of shame as he told me.

Larkin has not only the clear-sighted compassion of a Chekhov, but also his instinct for narrative and some of his sly wit, especially when targeting self-importance. I remember my glee reading, back in 1975, “Vagina” sonnet, from her first book, Housework.

Here’s the octet:

Is “vagina” suitable for use
In a sonnet? I don’t suppose so.
A famous poet told me, “Vagina’s ugly.”
Meaning, of course, the sound of it. In poems.
Meanwhile, he inserts his penis frequently
into his verse, calling it, seriously, “My
Penis.” It is short, I know, and dignified.
I mean, of course, the sound of it. In poems.

Then came the snappy close, in which the poet decided it was

a waste of brains—to be concerned about
this minor issue of my cunt’s good name.

I enjoy seeing naughtiness done in strict iambic pentameter, and it’s because Larkin (like Rich) was so well trained in traditional prosody that she (like Rich) also handles looser forms so well. Is it because she was so well trained in trouble—abortion, early marriage and divorce, alcoholism—that she handles human pain so well? Larkin’s list-poem “Inventory,” 41 lines long, may be the best single poem I have ever read about AIDS. It includes lines like these:

One who lifted his arm with joy, first time across the finish line at the New York marathon, six months later a skeleton falling from threshold to threshold, shit streaming from his diaper....
one who refused to see his mother,
one who refused to speak to his brother,
one who refused to let a priest enter his room,

and its final line is “one who wanted to live till his birthday, and did.” Numerous elegiac poems to friends and kin create their personalities so clearly and kindly that you think you know them yourself. Also numerous are poems evoking love affairs long and short, “the hot feast” on one occasion and “she smeared the lube/ the way you’d spread margarine” on another, equally precise. An early crown of sonnets on what may or may not have been a rape had me holding my breath, and at the same time burning with admiration for the poet’s acknowledgment of complicity. When Larkin in the title poem of My Body gives us a lengthy list of its flaws, but concludes that it is “still responsive to the slightest touch,/ grief and desire still with me,” and “healed and healed again,” I can only applaud.”
           ––Alicia Ostriker, The Women’s Review of Books
           [Read the full review here]