The Bodies

FREE VERSE EDITIONS, edited by Jon Thompson “The ‘flickering body’ in Christopher Sindt’s THE BODIES is luminous and personal, and serves as a guide. We are taken passionately into a world of disappearing wetlands, herons, oaks, apple grasses, dunes, and sea figs, beyond clarity and certainty. These poems are meditative histories of the natural world. They leap into the wild of earth, of feeling, and of language.” -JANE MILLER “Impossible perhaps-he thinks-to read the world, to sing it, to offer up its names. Yet, as Christopher Sindt reminds us in this probing and often startling collection, the world, that world, is all that is the case, with its Dantescan windings and sudden, Ovidian transformations. His encounters with it here, at once lyric and elegiac, tacitly argue that this “temporary world” might just be enough.” -MICHAEL PALMER “Tracing the intertidal circuits of story and understory, of body and soul, of land and sea, Christopher Sindt’s sensitive and intelligent poetry offers ‘a foundation for becoming.’ Acutely attentive to the ways ecology and its theology sing in harmony, THE BODIES strikes chords-voices and forms laid among and alongside each other. Here, the reader enters into the ways we all ‘must travel the land of/duplicate forms, hip bone of rabbit chasing after hip bone of fox.’ Sindt guides us through this terrain, from false clarity to a truer knowledge full of ‘seams and breaches.’ This is tide, song, transfiguring body: a poetry to be embraced with ‘both arms please.’” -ELIZABETH ROBINSON CHRISTOPHER SINDT is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of California, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and serves as the Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Studies. He lives in Oakland, California with his wife Leigh, his daughter Halina, and his son Luke. He is the author of the chapbook, The Land of Give and Take (Momotombo Press, 2002).