Jennifer Perrine holds degrees in Religion, Art, English, and Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Bellingham Review, Green Mountains Review, Nimrod, River Styx, and Southern Poetry Review, among others. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa, and teaches writing, gender studies, and Holocaust studies at Drake University.

Books by Jennifer Perrine: The Body is No Machine

Other poems on the web by Jennifer Perrine:
"War Bride"
"Stella"
"Ode to Julie"

About The Body is No Machine:

"What do we value in a body? Who should live and who should die? Why? These poems ask essential questions about our bodies of assumptions, individual and cultural. These poems make room for our faults and scars, our flaws and errors. Death, that older man it's easy to fall for, can at any time have any body he wants. But these poems, generous and tough, sing to us anyway, and wake in us the legless Peruvian lizards of possibility."
—Peggy Shumaker

"Jennifer Perrine is a poet of formal agility and surprise, with a command of language that ranges from the spare to the luxuriously rampant, from the scientific to the ecstatic. The Body is No Machine—indeed! Here we see the sensual body in all its chameleon shades of gender and passion. These poems are exact, intelligent, vivid, thrilling—a first book to admire, and a poet to watch."
—Betsy Sholl

"Jennifer Perrine's The Body is No Machine astonishes us with its deft balance of the sensual and the intellectual. DNA encodes 'the soft, deliquescent/ contours' of the self, which in love twists into 'gargoyle, cockatrice, glowing benthic/ animal' ('Coda, Codex, Codon'). The artichoke—'impenetrable' flower with 'translucent tongues'-is the new, indeterminable identity box to check on forms ('Gender Question #2'). In these lusciously languaged poems, Perrine is as grimly witty in grief as in joy, and The Body is No Machine is a dazzling debut collection."
—Cynthia Hogue