What the Body Already Knows by K.E. Ogden – NWVS #164 – 2021 NWVS WINNER

(3 customer reviews)

$15.99

 

K. E. Ogden‘s stunning chapbook, “What the Body Already Knows,” is a journey through grief for a father who “hung the sun” and a troubled mother who lives in memory as “fingerprints in the tops of all those biscuits.” Every poem is rooted in the world of the body—of those we love, of the earth, and of the sea, where the poet surprises herself by “singing underwater,” a perfect metaphor for what Ogden’s poetry accomplishes: a music all her own, rising, above all odds, from sorrow’s depths.

–Rebecca McClanahan, author of In the Key of New York City  and The Tribal Knot

*****

Every once in a precious while, a book comes into my life that shakes me out of my long days and worries, one that offers me honesty and real connection to its author. K.E. Ogden‘s new collection of poetry, What the Body Already Knows, is exactly that kind of book. These poems provide an atlas of loss, both to it and away from it, line by line. Whether telling the story of a mother lost in her sleep, a day lost to rumination over the corpse of a deer, or an entire year lost to loss itself, these poems show a way through it all. Yes, there is pain here, and fear, hospital rooms, and heavy memories from hard days, but these poems are much more than specimens lined up as examples of troubles in a drawer. They are alive, and colorful, and covered in all manner of beauty to render life’s real value.

–Jack B. Bedell, author of Color All Maps New, Poet Laureate, State of Louisiana, 2017-2019

*****

K. E. Ogden‘s What the Body Already Knows begins with a father highlighting for his daughter the way out. Of course there is no way out. This collection chronicles the “year of forgot to breathe,” the year both parents die. In a pastoral scene, we see the pond filled with tires and truck parts, the pond where they throw in a dead deer on the count of three. These harsh, beautiful poems stun us with honesty, grit, and transformation.

–Peggy Shumaker, author of CAIRN and Gnawed Bones

*****

K.E. Ogden‘s “What the Body Already Knows” manifests the circular and cyclical nature of grief with stunning directness and clarity. These poems are “muckings of primordial mud,” yet amazingly they give words to what cannot be said. Ogden examines the wreckage of loss, and these parts are “scooped up to make a new world.”  I have never thought of loss as a mirror before reading these poems, but grief in this collection becomes a way of seeing the self in a world forever changed.

–Adam Clay, author of To Make Room for the Sea

*****

 

 

 

 

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Description

What the Body Already Knows – NWVS #164 – 2021 NWVS WINNER

by K.E. Ogden 

$15.99, paper

978-1-64662-956-5

2022

In this award-winning, debut chapbook, K.E. Ogden turns our gaze to mapping grief as a transformative journey of resilience. These are songs of devotion to mud, bird shit, dead bodies, hot biscuits, a cat’s torn ear, shovels, and sawdust. Each poem translates tragedy into gateways for metamorphosis, inviting readers to make new worlds in changed landscapes, to see beauty in dark, shark-infested waters, and to find elation and joy in being alive.

K.E. Ogden is a poet, essayist, book artist and educator. Kirsten grew up in Honolulu,  Hawai’i and the SF Bay Area, and she spent almost every summer of her teen and twenty-something years in East Louisiana roaming the backroads with her grandmother. She loves writing on porches and still uses a typewriter for most things. A poet laureate of Gambier, Ohio, she teaches in Gambier each summer with the Kenyon Review Young Writer workshops and is one of the founding bloggers for KRO: Kenyon Review Online. A two-time judge for the Flannery O’Connor short fiction prize, Kirsten is also a former recipient of a Poetry Fellowship to Changsha, China from the CSULA Center for Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and a winner of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Award for her poem “My Atoms Come from Those Stars.” Her essays, poetry, and fiction have been published in Brevity, KRO: Kenyon Review Online, Louisiana Literature, Streetlight Magazine, Windhover, andberbo and elsewhere. Her digital quilt piece “My President: A Politics of Hope” was published at UnstitchedStates.com as part of a project curated by writer Gretchen Henderson. Kirsten is a certified Narrative Therapist and chairs the Creative Writing Committee at Pasadena City College. She believes that writing and poetry have the power to heal and to change the world. To learn more,
visit her website at kirstenogden.com

3 reviews for What the Body Already Knows by K.E. Ogden – NWVS #164 – 2021 NWVS WINNER

  1. Roger Marheine (verified owner) –

    I rec’d your book of poetry!
    First, congratulations on your long and very distinguished career as a poet.
    You are so talented, and your body of work shines with this new work.

    Some of my favorite lines
    “It juts from the water like two rotting teeth” (Kicker Rock)

    “It’s the birds that get me up so early–
    “…the cats clicking their teeth to the music.” (The Extra)
    “What is this all except a kind of fear forgotten in each serve (What the Body Already Knows)
    “Because your false teeth slipped into your margarita right after your divorce and I pretended not to notice”
    and “Because I watched you bathe and dry your new breast” (Mother’s Wings)
    “He confesses to using homeless and deranged people in his latest movie for realism” (Hush)

    The Great Sphinx is a haunting poem as are a number of others.

    Congratulations, Kirsten, on all your excellence.

  2. Luanne Castle (verified owner) –

    K.E. Ogden’s award-winning chapbook What the Body Already Knows introduces a distinctive new voice in poetry. These poems travel the rocky and winding path of grief over the loss of the poet’s parents, a not uncommon subject. But it’s the strong, direct, and loving voice—a voice that seems at one with the body–that drives the poems, that makes me wish I had written some of these lines. Ogden writes with simple description and then twists an image. Sometimes she juxtaposes more than one simple narrative or expository phrase with another in such a way that new meanings fan out like multiple reflections. Reading What the Body Already Knows is a powerful and satisfying event.

  3. Carole S. Mora (verified owner) –

    How do we mourn? How do we survive the experiences that undo us? By remembering, by “singing underwater,” from within the body, a place where words often fail, but images carry the resonances of a deep bodily sense of a remembered relationship, person, or moment. In K.E. Ogden’s recent chapbook What The Body Already Knows, language is crafted to carry this rough imagistic magic, allowing a rippling forth of this writer’s particular life story, while radiating out beyond the personal into a transpersonal register that touches the reader with all that is raw, real, and heart opening in the human condition that we all share. This is a brave collection, worthy of our attention because it helps us all learn how to celebrate the pain-filled thresholds of experience, as portals to acute aliveness, while cultivating a kind of gratitude that arises from the ability to deeply feel and remember the discrete contours of human experience, the place where “x” marks the spot.

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