When the Body is a Guardrail by Kara Dorris

When the Body is a Guardrail, Kara Dorris’s second full-length collection, invites us into a rural mythos, scaffolded in deer stands, covered in snow, and populated by human interferences: guns, highways, a truck that capsizes and spills its cargo of eggs until everything is at once breakable and beautiful. Masterful in its attention to image and craft, this is a book that reminds us of the fragility and the resiliencies of the body—“the breakable thing touching you / has always been your own skin.” Dorris also reminds us of the ways in which our landscapes mark and mar our lives, the impact of human behavior on the physical earth and psychological self. The speaker in the collection is unflinching, both entranced by the world and wary of it. Between the speaker-daughter and the parents of the book, a tension mounts, which she likens to trains meeting at a crossroads, “both must stop & neither can leave until the other is gone—.” This is a book in which escape is a way forward, not out, for the speaker, who is a trustworthy and enchanting guide.

–Jenny Molberg

When the Body is a Guardrail offers its readers such physical and concise language—and the voice captivates us on this journey. Dorris has perfected the art of the highway pastoral in this collection, and every single poem gives us something to think about—something to look deeper into. What I like about this collection is that the readers can see what Dorris paints for us—and yet the lyric of the writing isn’t lost in any way. Take, for example, this passage from the title poem: “We let our ditches / become washed-out bridges. / Our road-kill, trophy mirages. / Let gold meridians / & guardrails disintegrate / into breadcrumbs & suggestion.” While Dorris meditates on abstraction, we are still given ripe metaphors and imagery along the way. Essentially, When the Body is a Guardrail is a smart and engaging book of poetry. Period.

–Adam Crittenden

The Texas of childhood is Kara Dorris’s remembered paradise, though it might not be your walled garden. These graceful poems will introduce you to a world you did not know could be so beautiful, so heartbreaking. Here the poet asks, “are we only duty’s bit & whip,” and by the end of “When the Body is a Guardrail” you will understand the answer is “yes, and more.” Replete with cowboy churches, iron bridges, roadkill, flash floods, and guns, Dorris’s poems show us how the more ephemeral feelings can bloom in a hardscrabble world. A family (the sumptuous “we” in “we want/like the breath of air”) manages to develop a code of love and beauty across this piercing book.

–Connie Voisine