Love Like a Body Carried to Shore (Paperback)

Elegy for a broken world and all it—we—might still become.
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/>Love Like a Body Carried to Shore, from award-winning poet Abigail Chabitnoy, is an invitation to listen. This ecologically and emotionally charged collection explores continuity through water and weather, through the intimacies of relation, where knowing is a bodied verb. Moving with a tidal rhythm across its unsectioned form, the book weaves ancestral memory with myth. It stays with the work of environmental witness and extends its meditation to the permeability between human and animal. Domestic spaces blur with the mythic. The self emerges inside the landscape.
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/>Engaging Indigenous and Judeo-Christian cosmologies, Chabitnoy reconfigures these frames into openings toward mutuality. Amid ecological and cultural precarity, the poems enact reclamation, seeking moments outside of causal time, where future catastrophe loosens its hold long enough for the body to remember what it is to love the world and be loved by it.
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/>[sample poem]
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/>NOT A DRILL
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/>The berries were not
/>ripe we plucked and
/>burst on our tongues.
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/>We bent low to thumb
/>each foreign body that
/>opened
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/>held our breath to
/>record erratics
/>glissading
/>from the mountains we
/>left standing
/> the sigh of icemelts
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/>the rust we smelled
/>already monument.
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/>It was love we
/>pressed our fingers
/>through
/>the honeyed fungus 
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/>love we let the
/>shallow rooted
/>spruce stand 
/>where no one had need 
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/>love we sang to
/>chase the bears
/>from the 
/>brush 
/>
/>we projected 
/>on the iceberg 
/>when the dark was 
/>sufficient 
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/>love we refrained 
/>from throwing
/>stones at the
/>muddied lake. 
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/>Sea weeding  
/>through green 
/>it was love  
/>we did not pluck 
/>the unsightly
/>growth  from the  
/>supple  
/>earth.