Borrowing Your Body

Borrowing Your Body is a collection of poems that focus on the duties of being a daughter, sister, partner, and how to survive grief, sickness, and the ails that plague a person. The collection explores the unknown and imagined worlds, the boundless edges of invention, and the creative leaps the brain can make. Tackling themes of illness, death, sorrow, and the vast universe, these poems remind us we are all human.

Passin has written a book of the declining body, the disintegrating mind, the shredded remnants of what's left: glistening shards of language, the glowing soul, humor, beauty.

~ Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

Laura Passin's gorgeous debut, Borrowing Your Body, is a heartfelt delving into the strange places where science ends and the human begins. This work considers the cyborg-ian qualities of how "Chemistry is what makes you not you anymore."

I can't help but also hear the words burrow and bury tucked inside this title. Passin is deeply aware of the resonances here, how the defamiliarization of a loved one's body, speech, and identity opens into the space of the poetic, a space of multiplicity, a place where language is "stitching a name across the bone where my [our] thinking lives."

~ Andrea Rexilius, author of Sister / Urn (Sidebrow Books)

In Laura Passin's Borrowing Your Body, poetry is liquid gold that floods the gaps where words and memory fail. Charting the course of a mother's dementia, a brother's intellectual disability, and the pains of body and spirit, these poems unlock the door to inexpressible grief: "you need another tongue to tell it." Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gilt lacquer, Passin's forthright, self-aware poems restore what is broken by illuminating, not hiding, the cracks. These profound lyrical meditations on motherhood and daughterhood, memory and loss, pain and recovery empower with their courage while healing with their radiance. An extraordinary voice in extraordinary times, these poems will linger long after you've read the last page. "What billion eyes will blink at the light [she's] given back."  

~ Angela Narciso Torres, author of What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books)