®

Today's poem is "My Body The Haunted House"
from Advantages of Being Evergreen

Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of a previous collection, The Spectral Wilderness, selected by Mark Doty for the Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and a chapbook, The Gospel According to X. He is an assistant professor of poetry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

Other poems by Oliver Baez Bendorf in Verse Daily:
March 3, 2015:   "Inventory" "They said there would be spiders...."
April 19, 2012:   "Prelude" "what kind of / boy..."
December 24, 2011:   "Dog Days" "When my camera looks up at November, it shows me..."

Books by Oliver Baez Bendorf:

Other poems on the web by Oliver Baez Bendorf:
Two poems
"Evergreen"
"River I Dream About"
"Ghost Ship Novena Inside a Year-Long Funeral"
"Other Names"

Oliver Baez Bendorf's Website.

Oliver Baez Bendorf According to Wikipedia.

Oliver Baez Bendorf on Twitter.

About Advantages of Being Evergreen:

"This book... offers a topography of the body—each poem, a dropped pin, locating across a broad intricate landscape: memory, hunger, tenderness, grief, and fear. To read these poems is to trust the momentum of tributaries or the distance traveled when the trail is full of switchbacks. This work is an exercise of faith."
—Amaud Jamaul Johnson

"Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Oliver Baez Bendorf's remarkable Advantages of Being Evergreen is an essential book for our time and for all time... Baez Bendorf is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. I am living for the world these poems anticipate... This is a book of the earth's abiding wonder. And the body's unbreakable ability to bloom."
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi

"Written from and with death, the poems in Advantages of Being Evergreen offer elegies; they utter prayers that ask our dead to stay; they come as breath constrained and animated by a form that narrates an excess of natures, an excess of rivers that interrupt this book as the poet ponders the impossible question of what it means to be home. Here the body is a shared condition. The body is language. It changes. It resists. It mourns. It reincarnates with the 'teeth of our dead around our neck.'"
—Daniel Borzutzky



Support Verse Daily
Sponsor Verse Daily!

Home 
Archives  Web Weekly Features  Support Verse Daily  About Verse Daily  FAQs  Submit to Verse Daily  Follow Verse Daily on Twitter

Copyright © 2002-2020 Verse Daily All Rights Reserved