Book: To My Body (Chapbook)
Author: Steven Sanchez
Pages: 26
My Review and Thoughts:
This chapbook of poetry is stunning. Brilliant and downright utterly fantastic in so many wonderful ways. His truly awesome, blunt descriptive word play is thick and stays with you long after reading the poem. His poetry makes you want to return to the same piece repeatedly. The poetry teases your brain and gives it an emotional pleasure in stringing it along to read the next verse or next piece of poetry.
I am delighted and thoroughly excited about sharing and talking about this awesome Chapbook or better yet this awesome man of words. The brilliant Poet that truly knows how to create poetry and give the poet lover a spark, is why I love poetry in the first place. And Steven Sanchez captures that reality.
If you know me then you know I am a huge poetry buff, and when I come across a new poet and fall in love with that poet, my day, month and year is made solid because I found a new voice in the important reality of poetry. And Steven Sanchez is that voice.
His poetry is all the wonderful ways that poetry is. His poems really do transcend off the pages into the mind of the reader. I really felt this mix of poetry. I became one with it. This was a solid, quick read because of being only 26 pages and being a Chapbook, but it is something right after you read, you turn back to page one and start all over again.
Would I Recommend: In a heartbeat. One of the easiest recommendations. Can't speak highly enough of this work.
Would I return to it: Again, absolutely without a doubt? It has a demand on itself to be read, experienced and returned to.
Four Final Words: Sublime, Artistic Perfection, Meaningful.
My Rating: 4 out of 5
My Favorite Lines:
Page 3: Titled An Apology to my Body
each rib snag on muscle tissue like deep
rooted weeds. I would hold the deflated breast
in my palm and wash its soft skin, pale
as my scars, the color I wanted to be.
Page 14 Titled: The Anatomy of your Voice
At ten years old you hear yourself
on an answering machine and realize
why kids call you fag – your vocal cords
aren’t strings on a cello and aren’t steel braided cables suspending a bridge,
they’re membranes slit in your throat
like silver zils in a tambourine ringing
whenever you speak.