This Is My Body

Terry Song

In her first book of poems, Terry Song covers a range of topics: farm life, making a modern marriage in a traditional setting, the thrill and importance of everyday relationships. She has a gift for transposing ordinary situations into richly expressive poetic language, sometimes without even letting on that she’s doing it.

“As a writer she is a risk taker, and I believe her forthcoming book will establish her unusually personal, strong, intimate voice.  I admire how she seems unwilling to ever write a ‘safe’ poem—that is, a poem pushing all emotion beneath a glossy surface. . . . When I have heard her read, I have strongly identified with the various distinctive voices, and I have often asked myself, ‘How does she do that?’”—Kevin McIlvoy, Puerto del Sol

What we need now is bread,
soft dough to dig
fingers in, to knuckle and
pinch, pummel and punch
down.  Like the grass
when crushed under foot
springing back,
it will not cry out or
die like daughters
and sons.
If we must raise our
fists, let us
plunge them in the body
of yeast and wheat.
Bread is not flesh.
Our hands will come
clean if we rise like
acre upon acre of shining
grain.  Let us be sun-
ripe and light
like the crusty
loaves.  Let us break
bread.
             —“A Prayer for Peace”

5½ x 8½ inches • 56 pages • ISBN 0-931122-77-5 • $7.95