BOOK GALLERY | Dear Beast Lovelines

beast
 
Dear Beast Loveliness: Poems of the Body, by Tim J. Myers
 
 
Dear Beast Loveliness explores the riches and the struggles of that most fundamental of human experiences: having a body. Some of the most profound paradoxes we know involve our physical nature. On one hand, we all know the body with absolute intimacy; on the other, our perceptions and values vary astonishingly. Then there’s the ancient drama of fulfilling bodily needs and urges, with the concomitant struggle in how we think and feel about such things. It’s this fascination that led me to write these poems.
—Tim J. Myers
 
Because we are “pale sun” of ovum and “burrowing stars” of sperm–because we are carbon from which “existence itself draws out such music as is our being”–because our decay can begin as quickly as our conception–because we are both prayer and miracle–Tim J. Myers exalts the “happy animal” of the body in Dear Beast Loveliness. Myers celebrates the body in all its forms, whether a boy punting footballs that “lie at all angles like dark birds/ hunters have stunned from the autumn sky,” or the “palsied boy who walk[s] like a stutterer stutters,” or the sister whose anorexia turned her body “thin as a rake-handle,” or the “clash and tempest of desire” between man and woman. There is no body, limb, or organ, Dear Beast Loveliness says, that doesn’t deserve a praise song.” 

–John Olivares Espinoza, author of The Date Fruit Elegies 

 
Paperback: 114 pages
Publisher: BlazeVOX [Books]; first edition, 2013
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-60964-123-8
Chelsey Clammer
Chelsey Clammer is the author of the award-winning essay collection, Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017) and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Hobart, Brevity, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Normal School and Black Warrior Review. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing and is a freelance editor. Her next collection of essays, Human Heartbeat Detected, is forthcoming (Fall 2022) from Red Hen Press. www.chelseyclammer.com