Bodies Passing

Laura Altshul's poems are "lit with life," to steal a phrase from this poet whose work is insistent and tender in perfect measure. Bodies Passing opens for us the pot's lid allowing us to experience the intense sensory details stirred into poems such as On Kauai, where "Air lightens around us, surrounds us/ humid and salty, sweet with jasmine/ gardenia, funky garbage, burnt sugar cane/ fried peppers and onions." Subjects ranging from the wonderful ars poetica that opens the collection to a woman sleeping with the ashes of a murdered child bear the bold mark of a poet able to deftly tackle the terrors and joys that are the essence of human experience. Laura Altshul's book is a gift to those who hunger for honesty and compassion in this complex world of ours.

-Julia Paul, Manchester Poet Laureate



Bodies Passing observes and celebrates the life of the body--its power and pains, its delights and limitations. Laura Altshul's earthy poems delve into sex, childbirth (or in some cases, animal birth), illness, infidelity, and the urgent impulse to get up and dance. The people in her poems come to life as complicated and interesting individuals. These poems, while not shying away from the wounds that come with living, are joyously affirmative.

The title poem, "Bodies Passing," includes the phenomenon of a set of adult identical twins, one an astronaut and the other earthbound, who find that the one who escaped gravity for a while has grown two inches taller. The same poem poignantly observes an aging woman and her daughter. The mother is getting shorter as age compresses her spine. Their "two bodies passing / like the down escalator / viewed from the rising one."

The poems in this collection are those of a talented writer, and they are full of great humanity.

--Ginny Lowe Connors, author of Toward the Hanging Tree: Poems of Salem Village