Description
Body Braille by Beth Gylys is a collection that explores the failures and complications of existing in the world as a sentient being. Broken into five sections, four of the first five focus around a particular sense: touch, taste, vision/sight, and hearing. The book’s final section—comprised of a crown of elegiac sonnets—follows a man after he loses his wife as he fights through the initial stages of grief. The collection—bookended by poems of intimacy and death—moves through the senses, reimagining the possibilities and failures of the body, and ending in death/life after excruciating loss. The collection is one undergirded by loss but also threaded through with resilience, a resilience that expresses itself as humor, as defiance, as longing, and as survival. Ultimately, the collection attempts to gain purchase on our humanity through its exploration of sensual and bodily experience.
Praise for Body Braille
A book of rhetorical variation, risky admission, and sonnets that move from humor to bone-cutting grief, Body Braille is proof of Beth Gylys’s ability to tell the truth: “You can’t keep your eye / from the grotesque growths / that mar its surfaces.” These poems center around a life fully lived given what the eyes might see and what the hands can touch: “I lifted from one lonely / space to the next, / thinking, love, love, love.”
—Jericho Brown
The poems in Beth Gylys’s aptly titled new book, Body Braille, honor the D. H. Lawrence imperative that graces one of the book’s sections as its epigraph: “We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.” Beth Gylys achieves something very difficult: vision by tactile means; sensual intimacy without confessional exhibitionism (see “My Closest Brush with Anarchy”). She can scare you a little (“Anglerfish”), make you laugh and wince in alternate lines (“Bikini Waxes and Taxes”), and impress you with her natural affinity for the villanelle, that most challenging of verse forms. Extending the accomplishment of her previous collection, Bodies That Hum, Body Braille is a lovely hymn to the senses, all six of them, intermingled to their mutual enhancement.
—David Lehman
Body Braille, Beth Gylys’ newest book of poems, considers the erotics of both language and touch, and the ways our bodies navigate the many losses that make up a life. In these poems, Gylys gives us a brave, tender, and extraordinarily honest look at love, in particular the intimacy of second marriage, with its mid-life awareness of mortality, familial grief and betrayal, and our human willingness to trust despite the terrifying violations we have both suffered from and inflicted on others. “Delicious / will be my paradigm,” Gylys writes, reminding us that, though we may trick ourselves into believing—or saying—almost anything, the body itself never lies, its hungers alive to remind us of our most profound fears, hopes, and desires, keeping us honest where our minds—and tongues—might lead us astray.
—Paisley Rekdal
