My nerves expose, unwilling; these cells & fibers race in transmit; oh impulse of me; skin peeled away, how defense fails; & my eyes, oh eyes, in uncontrollable wet; to witness, to experience decimation in the aortic sack; oh society oh; what you cull, piece by piece; what you strip; what grows back only in time, in time; hold these bones up to the light; do you see me in porous cavities forming despite what torn & torn; my flesh under your claws; from hollow & cold & seamless, I rise; sew this heart anew; I long to forgive you. Forgive.
Poem to America
Felicia Zamora
Feature Date
- August 9, 2020
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Copyright © 2020 by Felicia Zamora
from “Body of Render”
Red Hen Press
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Felicia Zamora is the author of five books of poetry including Body of Render, 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award winner (2020) and Of Form & Gather, 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (2017). She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA, Moth Magazine, and Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard. Her poems and essays appear widely including Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review, Boston Review online, Georgia Review, Literary Hub, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, Prairie Schooner, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of English/poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
"Language is action in these poems, which are utterances of pleading, fighting, and mending in an America we can hardly stand to look at straight on. Body of Render is a book of saying what must be said: 'say Capitol Hill be voice of all your people, be just; in haunt, you must be voice, must.' The risks Felicia Zamora takes with form, syntax, and breath pay off in poem after poem—and make Body of Render one of the most dynamic—most transformative—collections I’ve read in years.
—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
“In response to the 2016 election and resulting stripping of basic human rights, Zamora penned this compelling and dynamic collection to enrage and inspire action.”
—Featured in Ms. Magazine's list of "Poetry for the Rest of Us 2020"
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