It is with great pleasure and no small bit of pride that we announce the availability of The Anatomy Theater by Nadine Sabra Meyer. This first collection was a winner of the 2005 National Poetry Series. The NPS is a collective program establishd in 1978 by Ecco's own Daniel Halpern to "recognize and promote excellence in contemporary poetry by ensuring the publication of five books of poetry a year through a series of participating publishers." Univeristy of Illinois, HarperCollins, Coffee House Press, Verse Press/Wave Books, and Penguin Books were 2005's participants. Esteemed poet and NPS judge John Koethe selected Meyer. For more detailed information about NPS, and the list of the 2006 winners, please visit their homepage.
Here's what Koethe had to say about the book: "Meyer's Anatomy Theater is a powerful and harrowing book. In it the human figure is reduced to its primary elements -- musculature, organs, bone -- yet remains palpable and present. The transcendent is completely exorcised, 'as thoughts decompose under anesthesia / then cease to exist.' This is a poetry without a trace of sentimentality or specious celebration, yet it remains grimly affirmative as it 'distills / from the stench of flesh, pure thought.' The language is riveting, and the lines have a sinuous complexity that is hypnotic. Meyer's unit of composition is the sentence, that is to say the thought, and she writes at a high level of tension. As the book unfolds the focus expands from the biological to the aesthetic, the personal and the historical, groping towards the possibility of escaping 'the body's domesticity for a sky both lightning struck and mute,' and of the transformation of anatomy into history. The Anatomy Theater is a stunning debut."
Got that? She frames our sanguine physicality in language so incisive and curious that since finishing the book I’ve been told on several occasions to "put the pen knife down...Now!" Meyer contemplates the origins of her visceral philosophy and reveals a world of characters and organs that will remain relevant as long as surgery saves lives. Her physiological contemplation can be gruesome, but her insight is no less true. Take, for example, an excerpt from "The Cadaver," a poem, fashioned after Jean Riolan's Les oeuvres anatomiques (1629), that gives life to what's dead:
He lies on his side, hips stacked, chest thrown
back, chin thrust forward as in waking...
...But his abdomen has been split, penis
to sternum, and an anatomist opens the lips
of his wound. He has been given a second sex,
as if to slit and enter the body were
fundamentally sexual.
Yet from the explicit act of opening a cadaver, Meyer moves to higher thoughts that circle above the body, though still rooted in the physical heart; the final poem, "John Donne on His Deathbed," corroborates this:
You glistened like a baked and porous shoreline
so racked with chill, the trees threw their hair
in the sand, the canoes, though tightly lashed,
ricocheted in the dilated coverts of your arteries,
and your physicians, with a love
grown wild, examined each grit and follicle
as though it were a sign. Be this, you wrote,
slick with love, salted in dying, my Text,
my Sermon to mine own: the body as emblem
or prophet! O, mysterious oracle, that leads us
from this world into the next, by what science
do we decipher you, by what strange anatomy?
And so on, I would be doing all a disservice to feature the entirety of the last poem. So there you have it. I am excited to be involved with this book and author; and I hope this brief expose has piqued your interest as well. In case it has, I'll be giving away free copies of The Anatomy Theater by Nadine Sabra Meyer to the first five readers who e-mail me at [email protected] with Anatomy Theater in the subject line and their address in the body.
Also, with any luck, Nadine will be joining us on the Cruelest Month in the coming weeks!
- MS
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