Outer-Body Travel by Kathleen Ellis

“How brazenly we curve the world to our selves,” Kathleen Ellis writes in “The Square-shouldered Man Supporting the Heavens.” Her poems engage us in the here-and-now and the way-out-there, the mythical and the scientific. “Venus envy,” Eve and Lucy (of fossil fame), Tai Chi, swimming pools (via David Hockney) and swimmers, space travel—Ellis’s universe is ever-expanding and full of revelations. My kind of traveling companion.

–Carl Little, author of Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems

In Outer-Body Travel, the journey goes deep into the physical body and out toward the far reaches of space. Ellis asks, “How do we know anything?” And she probes that question in subtle, masterful poems that give us both the gravity—gravitas—of bodies on earth and the weightlessness of bodies in water and in space, testing their limits. The imagination that guides these poems is plentiful, ranging from our origins at the vanishing point of human history out to solar winds. But the poems always return to earth, to “the breath you live in,” and from that breath they make for us a very beautiful singing, indeed.

–Betsy Sholl, author of Otherwise Unseeable