bodys

Vanessa Roveto's debut collection, bodys, is a work of stunning strangeness, force, and audacity, generated by-and degenerating toward-the unanswerable question at the heart of poetic speech: What does it mean to be "e;a person?"e; A dizzying hybrid of poetry and prose, post-human analytics and ribaldry, spiritual autobiography, and grim satire, Roveto lends exacting voice to "e;a most complicated vocabulary of feeling-your-feelings."e; Viscerally drawn to forbidden states and suspicious of its own desires, bodys is literature as high-risk, low-tech radiology, mapping the dim edges of identity and identification: "e;Brain scans indicated the moral center and the disgust center overlap on the mind field."e;Roveto's sentences hurtle forward with withering disjunctive energy, laying down traps of wordplay, tacking toward and veering away from syntactical targets, trying-on and sloughing-off pronoun positions with abandon. Yet for all its postmodern bravado-and irreverence, and frequent scary hilarity-bodys remains abidingly attached to exploring the problem of a human speaker addressing itself to another, and colliding with its own otherness along the way. It is the same problem-articulation as disarticulation-that animates the great Renaissance sonnet sequences, from which bodys is affectionately, and perversely, descended. What is bodys-what are bodys-anyway? A dysfunction in the body's ability to multiply itself? A dysmorphic take on the body's sense of its reality? A dystopian vision of a world in which boundaries between selves and others have been overwhelmed by commerce, surveillance, medical technology, nihilistic agitprop? "e;Last night one of the girls asked about the relationship between a body and nobody,"e; Roveto writes. "e;It was the beautiful question."e;