"Surprises, Devastates, Delights": "God in Her Ruffled Dress" Reviewed in Calyx, Publisher of Art and Literature by Women

Calyx's newest digital issue includes reviews of books by Rebecca Faulkner, Judith Barrington, Molly Kugel, Debra Magpie Earling, and me!

Cover of recent issue of Calyx, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women

Reviewer Bethany Reid, an excellent poet herself, captures the book with sensitive insights. Some excerpts: 

"Toward the beginning of God in Her Ruffled Dress, the poet is commanded, Write me, write me, write me, and Lisa B writes—lines clenched between her teeth like a bridle’s bit or the pit of a sour cherry. From its provocative title to the last sentence, this...heretical book surprises, devastates, and delights.

God is one central theme of the book, but not so much the One Dad God as the body created in God’s image. Even in the first poem, a prayer, God is the bodies of all the men I’ve loved, but also breasts, and unpronounceable / …carved in stone / particles of sand and granite adhering into a tablet / a forgotten language (“God No. 2”). Bodies are fallible and magical at once. If God is found in human bodies, then also in the bodies in mass graves.

Subsequent poems take up the question of what it means to live in a body. A Jewish body with its genetic storehouse / in the back of her neck (“The Contract”); a body with Type 1 Diabetes with its white hem of cells. The context expands and contracts, keeping us off balance. In “Watching the Sea,” testing one’s blood sugar is like looking into the ocean:

I’m doing what a patch of cells
forgot to do.
A still underpart of a cave in my body
forgot to be part of the sea.
For an instant I am inside that sea.
A face above peers through the water,
its huge eyes green,
alert and round,
the face vague and then clear
through the waves, the stillness, the waves.

Lisa B is also an accomplished jazz and groove musician with seven albums, and she is a trained psychic. No wonder then that we encounter musicians here, with their melodious bodies; no wonder that the poems dive so deeply into one consciousness after another. [such as] In “Trane’s Ride (Naima),” [about] jazz great John Coltrane...

God in Her Ruffled Dress insists that we, too—despite (and because of) our sexy, smoky, moldering, disruptive bodies—are part of the body of God, and that God is not who we think she is."

This journal is particularly important to me because it is among the first literary publications to publish my poems, more than two decades ago. Coincidentally, the issue includes work by Gail Wronsky, a member of the collective What Books Press, the publisher of my new book. 

Cover of the Issue of Calyx including My Poems More Than Two Decades Ago

Contributors to Calyx Vol. 8, No. 3, Years Ago

Yes, the shot includes my unadorned toes... Well, why edit them out in a review about this book dwelling so much on the human body?