What Bodies Have I Moved – poems – Chelsea Dingman

What Bodies Have I Moved
poems, Chelsea Dingman
Madhouse Press, 2018

~

‘…Archangel Michael, Abraham—

young boys again. You ask them about
hunger.’ – {from} Reconstructing the Saints

‘…What if
the next city…is the city where I’ll find my own

ashes?’ – {from} I Imagine How the Man Who Built Her Hung Himself

Chelsea Dingman’s What Bodies Have I Moved is a book of foreground and footprint for which you’ll need both hands. In it, people are place, and voice a narrator of excavations undertaken to identify the carrier of the chalk. What alarm does one set for stillness? It is in this interrupted dream of a history, a history that doesn’t repeat itself so much as stutter the unspeakable, that Dingman is able to unearth the out-of-body. The past is childless. The present a map of our preconceived notions of ruin. As in Thaw, Dingman’s previous collection, the words here have a way with absence that, for the reader, bring landscape home.

~

reflection by Barton Smock

~

book is here:
https://www.madhousepress.org/