POEMS ARE THE ONLY REAL BODIES
Jennifer Tamayo

This sold-out chapbook is available as a free book. Read or download the PDF here.

Poems Are the Only Real Bodies is also included in our first chapbook-compliation volume, BOUND: The First Array.

Praise for Poems Are the Only Real Bodies

“It doesn’t seem wrong to call this text iconoclastic. Tamayo doesn’t smash the statue of Tubman, but does ‘dangle from [her] big hand like a metaphor: I’m the slobbery noodle.’ Other idols these bodies try to undo from the inside out: art as collaboration between maker and viewer; art (or bodies) as neutral, innocuous, safe, nonviolent; the idols of the past as bodiless and saintly; choices as real. In the anatomy Tamayo provides, writing something means invading it, means filling its body with your body. To write about is to write into. To read is to be written into. The most coalescing and compelling word in these bodies was the compressed word ‘sobject’—we may sob when we’re physically hurt, or in the pleasure/pain of sex, or in pleasure when we bite into something delicious, or in anguished loss or frustrated rage. …An epistle may be a letter—often meant for more than one reader—or an argument or assertion or coercion in the form of a letter, wearing a letter’s skin in order to get in. There’s a simultaneous sense of intimacy and an armed (many-armed) invasion of privacy. Do these e-pistols make me a sobject? Do they take me over, use me, fuse with me, expose me; do they wear me like a skin? Sometimes. Reading the lines of these bodies, my strongest reaction is often to push back against them, not wanting them to be true, but having a hard time rejecting or resisting them entirely. They march me queasily to their truths: ‘There is a pleasure to the body torn to pieces.'” —Kate Schapira, Small Press Book Review