We Live in Bodies
Ellen Doré Watson
“With its clear voice, sexiness, paradoxes, and fiery pulse, Doré Watson’s book will certainly send ripples in the too often monotonously safe lakes of contemporary poetry—and I’m grateful for that. We Live in Bodies is resonant with passion and emotional courage . . . at once irresistibly funny, moving, lighthearted, and grave.”
—The Bloomsbury Review
"Ellen Watson is an eloquent, passionate poet; generosity of imagination distinguishes both her gift for language and her emotional sympathy:
interrogative, tender, wildly inventive, with the wonder of childhood and a grown woman’s comic sense. And her work has the quality of movement.
Watson’s poetry is the real thing."
—Robert Pinsky
"How well Ellen Doré Watson reminds us that we do, indeed, live in bodies. You will close this book exhilarated by its quirky, passionate poems and
grateful for its huge heart fired and fed by a prodigious imagination. This is brilliant, urgent work."
—Thomas Lux
about the author
Ellen Doré Watson directs the Poetry Center at Smith College and serves as poetry editor for The Massachusetts Review. She is the author of four books of poems, including two from Alice James, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York Award. Her most recent collection, This Sharpening, was published by Tupelo Press. Individual poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker.
She was named by Library Journal one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century.” Among her other honors are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She has translated a dozen books from the Portuguese, including The Alphabet in the Park, the selected poems of Brazilian Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press).
Author photo by Robin Todd
two poems from we live in bodies
also by ellen doré watson: ladder music
