In the Body of Our Lives

Poetry. IN THE BODY OF OUR LIVES, Jeanne Wagner's second full-length collection of poems, looks back on a Cold War-era childhood and its effect on the construction of a self. Refusing both sentimentality and censure, the poet shines an unflinching light on a home characterized by alienation, stringent Catholicism, shadowy alcoholism, and the inescapable attitudes and historic events of the 1950s. We proceed by images—the stitching up of Frankenstein's monster, cups wobbling on a dinner table, a child's desire to wear her clothing inside out—until we realize that it is a life that is being crafted. With intelligence and vivid language, Wagner writes of the body as a perpetual stranger, yet, illuminated by subtly shifting qualities of light, the body remains a home, the housing of life itself.