Body of Work by Rowe Carenen

Rowe Carenen has been taking notes. In Body of Work, the bodies observed are working, not working, and at every middle-aged point in between. With careful attention, Carenen witnesses bodies (with so much work to do!) who are unanticipated, unappreciated, and largely unseen. She begins with her own working body: “I don’t know who told me first to be small, to be little, to shrink down to less than in order to fit.” She juxtaposes this moment of self-reckoning with her best friend’s cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Am I sick enough? Carenen asks. She mourns Ethel, the daughter she will never have. She loves—and is loved—after divorce. She holds space for the ailing world: “Measles are back in Texas and Georgia.” And yet, even with so much shit, there are daffodils in her yard.

This is the book you read when you just can’t take anymore, and there is still so much to take. This is the friend who guides you through it.

–Mari Ramler, Associate Professor of English, Tennessee Tech University

In Body of Work, Rowe Carenen writes with breathtaking fierceness and vulnerability. These are radical love poems forged in a time when the world is on fire—testaments to how much a woman can endure: the ache of longing, of loss, of what’s been taken—through a hysterectomy, a thyroidectomy, and what the poet willingly surrenders. Still, she finds her way—eventually running to, and not away from herself.

In doing so, she wields her voice like water, quelling the flames. She instructs us to do the same: to keep fighting, keep loving, in these hard-won spaces. To find joy, even in the turmoil. To look beyond the din and notice the daffodils.

–Glenis Redmond, Author of The Listening Skin