Body Braille

Body Braille by Beth Gylys is a collection that explores the failures and complications of existing in the world as a sentient being. Broken into five sections, four of the first five focus around a particular sense: touch, taste, vision/sight, and hearing. The book’s final section–comprised of a crown of elegiac sonnets–follows a man after he loses his wife as he fights through the initial stages of grief. The collection–bookended by poems of intimacy and death–moves through the senses, reimagining the possibilities and failures of the body, and ending in death/life after excruciating loss. The collection is one undergirded by loss but also threaded through with resilience, a resilience that expresses itself as humor, as defiance, as longing, and as survival. Ultimately, the collection attempts to gain purchase on our humanity through its exploration of sensual and bodily experience.