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Distance From Birth Tracy Philpot 0-9709342-1-1 $13.00 ©2001 order this title       Tracy Philpot lives just outside Seldovia, Alaska, a remote community accessible only by plane or boat, in a little cabin with her husband, son, and animals. She received her Ph.D. and MA from the University of Denver, and now works as an advocate for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Her first book, Incorrect Distances, was published by the University of Georgia Press.       Tracy Philpot's Distance From Birth possesses an original fervor that arises from the injured earth out of the injured mouth. Here is a generous, whole-fleshed poetic idiom, stringent yet wild, blasted yet flexible enough to mark threat and scar as well as capture the sports of the heart. In the often thorned convolutions of these poems, the music may seem at first broken with emotion, but I think it is rather the lovingly intact wording for a broken world. What intially may appear as stark and severe is not a resistence but an acceptance, an allowing through, a faithfulness that may be torn of hope but is never without the refracting beauties of frost, of the glimpse. —Dean Young	Tracy Philpot's poems are as close, intimate and, at times, as startingly strange as one's own hand. Intimate and tender, the poems keep speaking into the open hesitancies they create with an uncommon courageousness of heart, and in an evolving ethics of what it might mean to be human: "you can't live for years write god/and then out of desperation/write God because of what the earth loses." —Gillian Conoley     From the Preface: She is our most unmediated poet, ravening in her flesh for the flesh of every moment which, after all, is an animal fed by heart. —Donald Revell
from Distance From Birth
Billy's Oral Prison when we opened to the shelter for abused men no one came what happens in our homes is private (is America) we hurt who we can experts in denial and mutilation the fear of thinking of the degree of loneliness how few people have had sober incurable sex I wish I could tell a story like stalking—the naked life as seen from behind—following… blue liquid congeals at the line of his lips as he talks to strangers at coffee says to a woman "you look like one I knew in the hospital who gave me pussy" he says "the cannibalism in 'alive' is like a bad period" some like their heads covered in sleep some cry so prettily when they're chased he says "I had a tiny arm hanging at my shoulder but they cut it off"