Naked Rib by Deborrah Corr

 

Animated by Deborrah Corr’s muscular voice, each poem in “Naked Rib” is an act of retrieval. The book opens with the child-self claiming the primordial mother Eve (“I lifted her out of the ink and drank her”), then arcs through a life driven by hunger for connection and ultimately carved, as we all are, by love and its loss. These are poems that embody the transformational power of words to keep and carry forward what we love.

–Elizabeth Austen, former Washington State Poet Laureate and author of Every Dress a Decision

 

Deborrah Corr’s Naked Rib is a powerful collection of lyric poems illuminating dramatic moments in a life.  Her skillful use of biblical imagery in the first poem, “I was Eve,” announces her themes:  the desire for sensual experience and freedom from strictures, communion with the natural world, and coming into the power of the female body.

 

Often elegiac in tone, these poems map a journey through the ferocity of childhood longings, the growth of sensual awareness, into the experience of motherhood, marriage, and family.  A central sequence of the book explores the loss of her husband and daughter to cancer, (“cancer, the camera, its shutter snapping/ closed, first on him, then on her.”) These grief-stricken meditations show her arrival at the hard-earned understanding “to pay / attention to what I’ve been given.”

 

What we readers have been given here is a beautifully crafted collection of deeply moving poems.

–Alicia Hokanson, author of Perishable World and Mapping the Distance

 

There will be safety in the honest word. In this book a fearless girl child grows to be the woman given to saying hard things with grace, not one to deny the rewards of temptation taken, even when results are dire. Isn’t this life for living full, no matter what a poem has to say to help a reader face it? Mean love, frenzied loss, cancer, epiphany—early in this book you learn, and by end you know: I will follow this voice anywhere.

–Kim Stafford, author of As the Sky Begins to Change and former Oregon State Poet Laureate