LOST BODY [order]

Selected for publication in the National Poetry Series by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer, Terry Ehret’s first book explores her sense of estrangement from needs and desires, and often from her own body as she struggles for identity and definition and the continual recreation of self in intimacy, in motherhood, and in language. She comes into language as if wading into a foreign elements, walking “the boundary between the dead and the silence of her ordinary life,” taking the reader into myth, memory, dream, sexual desire, and in the final section, through an imaginative interpretation of an ancient hieroglyph text.

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“Terry Ehret is a wonderfully various, resourceful poet.

Her play with forms works always towards ease and freedom.

Her  timing is faultless, a joy in itself; and her fearlessness in exhilarating.”
                                                                        —Ursula K. Le Guin

 

 

“Sip the last of my heart’s sweet. Drink my wrath,/my golden, sunny boredom,” warns anyone’s expectations. 

In Terry Ehret’s Lost Body, an old embodiment is slipped out of, a new, uncertain and richly clamorous body claimed.

Language rips apart the given of a life that could once belief in its single-minded contract of womanhood/motherhood. 

Anything is possible in the life of the poem, where lines of demarcation drift, chant and haunt.

To read her is to become invested, repeatedly...at the most serious and disquieting level of song,

where one crosses over to the unfamiliar and recognizes it and is changed.”
                                                                        —Kathleen Fraser

 

 

“Terry Ehret’s poetry is vivid, compelling, full of energy, yet it shows a soft maternal gentleness as well.

She is, at the same time, lucid  yet mysterious. She uses repetition as an incantation:

like the unending murmur of a woman rocking herself, to control pain,

to invite composure, or to match the rhythms of sex or procreation.

I salute her achievement. Her poems are one more step for womankind.”
                                                                        —Carolyn Kizer