The Body’s Politics / La politica del cuerpo

As a child, Jessica Nooney danced to the poetry in her tiny living room. She could leap very high and stay in the air for a long time. Those two elements have shown up in her poetry thirty years later.

Her poetry often deals with women’s lives. She believes that the more we acknowledge and name the specific actions and feelings of women’s lives, the better the situation of women will be in the world.

Here are a few verses as samples of her poetry:

From Old woman on a seesaw:

Time roils for a fight. Mean swells of madness I am hot to totter men and war. This world teeters on my eyelid rolls down my cheek. When it’s real the fulcrum is love set at this point between sadness and fury.

From Room change at the Gay Center:

On the other side of the wall a boy is singing shadows of music, cadences of regret. Memory of songs sung through decades. They are spinning golden legends in the sadness as the sun sets out all the many windows of this new room. A room that is a change. Distant skyscrapers turn gold now. The voices. Listen. The voices muting as the sun goes down. The faint human voices. This new present.

The Body’s Politics / La pol tica del cuerpo was translated into Spanish and edited by Roberto Mendoza Ayala; it contains beautiful photo/digital images by Jessica Nooney, and has a cover designed by the graphic artist Alonso Venegas G mez based on a photograph by Grove Nooney.

The Body’s Politics / La pol tica del cuerpo, is the seventh title in the Bridges series of bilingual poetry books edited in New York City by Darklight Publishing LLC.