Spine

FREE VERSE EDITIONS Series Editor: JON THOMPSON Praise for SPINE: "My fellow-/assemblages of cells and I thread/ our minds through the loops/of our bodies" is as succinct a statement of the human (not to mention non-human as well) condition as I have ever read. The loops and hoops of bodies, of the physical constraining the spiritual, is the essential conflict providing the dazzling energy of this brilliant book. These are love poems from and to every conceivable form of life, which is a kind of definition of poetry itself, after all. -BIN RAMKE When I read the poems of Carolyn Guinzio, I feel like I'm learning what it's like to be part of a natural setting - one species among others - and yet, at the same time, aware of the technology of my own mind processing it all. It's like being in the world, of the world, and something else too, something indefinable. As she puts it: "Behind this world, that other --/ Where a spine divides the hemispheres./ (We return to the surface, / unable to say what we've seen.)" Except in these poems, which teach us how to look. -ELAINE EQUI In her spellbinding SPINE, Carolyn Guinzio seems to consider recontextualizing all of nature and all of "the text" within the tricks, the forms, and the electricity of the worldwide web. But the wires can fall in the storm. I kept waiting for a solar flare to ruin all the satellites and put things right, but this book is more brilliantly ambivalent than that. And it is that relentless ambivalence, that relentless noticing, that become among the extreme plsrs of this txt. -SARAH VAP ABOUT THE AUTHOR: CAROLYN GUINZIO'S previous collections are West Pullman (Bordighera, 2005), winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize, Quarry (Parlor, 2008), and Spoke & Dark (Red Hen, 2012), winner of the To The Lighthouse/A Room Of Her Own Prize. Find her online at carolynguinzio.tumblr.com