STRANGE BODIES

Naffziger dismantles the familiar in this volume of poetry.

The title poem, “Strange Bodies,” introduces the collection’s central of theme of knowing as it pertains to the body—the only tangible vessel we have to navigate the world: “The fact of the matter is / your body operates in total darkness.” The poems are not unnerving; rather, the speaker gently invites the reader to surrender to chaos of human experience. Later in the collection, the speaker further underscores the fallibility of knowing: “By the time you arrive you will know / what I know or more than I know” (“Poem to my Younger Self”). Naffziger’s use of contrasting imagery, especially in the poems that deal with death, is stunning: In “In Delirium: A Pantoum,” the body transcends this life to become, simultaneously, both stardust and a corpse (“Without a body, my limbs / are shattered stars blasting cosmic radiation / through every breath I ever took… / …turned by time, buried beneath sediment”). The striking contrast between two husbands and wives emerges in elegant couplets that marry life with death in “A Tale of Two Women”: “Today I make gazpacho while Joe is dying. / My husband picks tomatoes and cucumbers, // carries them to the kitchen like he always does. / I peel oxhearts. Billie holds her husband’s hand.” The empathy, verging on telepathy, that binds the halves of each couplet evokes the deepest kind of human connection. The end of the book links a series of poems with black-and-white photographs by Mark Hackworth. Some poems tell stories of family, of generations living and dead, existing together in the tapestry of familial bonds. Other poems play with ideas from theoretical physics in a bid to make sense of human experience. The physical is always imbued with the metaphysical in these verses as the author steps back from the confines of time and space to make room for the infinite possibilities of existence and promote an almost Buddhist philosophy of the interconnectedness of all things.

Naffziger’s poetry boldly emancipates the soul from its worldly shell.