These sophisticated poems approach the slippery and subtle areas between beauty and darkness, sanity and disorientation, and hunger and survival, and, in so doing, create a coherent story about the grace and fragility of being female. Pennisi’s light touch and restraint set these poems apart. Her language is masterful, varied, musical, and precise.
A ballerina will not stop
inserting her small foot
into a slim pink shoe,
crisscrossing silk ribbons
over the bone of ankle.
Sometimes I slip into the inside
of her body, where the soul
wells into the walls that cup
the music, quivering there
like a diver in a swarm
of tropical fishes, her shape brushed
with undulations of hunger
and wonder, a hundred bodies
of tremulous light. The dancer’s shoes
fill with flesh; her flesh
brims with music. What can she do
with such hunger, such sadness?
What can her body do
but tremble and spill
into dance?
Listen to “Red Running through It,” “Wor(l)ds,” “Any Weather,” “Somewhere in a Dark Auditorium,” “Lost Shoes,” and “Reddening the Moon,” read by Linda Tomol Pennisi:
Out of print