Bücher von Kara Dorris

Set along lonely highways, the voices within When the Body is a Guardrail are restless and searching-these poems are seeking new ways of seeing, of being, of interpreting what it means to be human. Too often we treat life like a highway, like an 80s rock ballad, as both distance and a bridge, speeding towards some vast unknown, donning knee and shoulder pads, shin-guards and helmets, learning "to pull on flak jackets" and "to tread with stealth" that jewelry "jangles like an aftermath of traps." We want to be close, create intimacy without risk, but fail. And when we fail, we cannot forgive each other, or ourselves. The truth is, we drive into the morning light forgetting that experience will change us by the time we drive home through the evening sun. Each time we change, we become a new person, versions of ourselves that are never fully erased. When the Body is a Guardrail doesn't hide from disappointment or failure, that "soft-wet empty snow already understands." This collection begs us to pay attention: to the isolation of routine and small towns; to our allegiance to beginnings and endings but not to the journey itself; to the addict inside all of us. With eyes on the horizon, we are always looking for that bliss, that Eden, that perfection, and we are always failing. However, these poems are testaments to our resiliency, because despite all our flaws, we keep trying, we keep trucking along with windows rolled down and radios blaring.

Set on the trans-Siberian railway, these poems take up themes of mobility as well as the body and the self created through loss. In the collection, loss is generated through travel as it strips away the mundane routines used to define ourselves, such as homes, careers, families. For example, one poem focuses on the interaction between the speaker and an elderly Russian woman who perceives something evil in the speaker's surgery scars despite the brief encounter. In each poem, we see the speaker evolving and redefining self-identity through location, through unexpected connections and disconnections, through the present and the past. Dorris focuses on the body's role in mobility and self-creation because she has a genetic bone disorder which causes benign tumors, or osteocondromas, to form at her joints. As she grew, so did the tumors interfering with normal growth patterns; her right leg is shorter, her right arm is several inches longer, and she has strange knobs of bone sticking out. All that said, she walks, jogs if she must, dances and hopscotches (although not gracefully). For years she avoided writing about disability because she wanted to avoid sounding melodramatic and self-pitying, but while completing an MFA, she realized her disability colored the way she perceives the world and her role inside it; consequently, her poetics lean towards erasing, running, and eventually disassembling illusions, as well as contributing to the dialogue of disability poetics.