Bed

The poems in Bed, many written during prolonged bed rest, examine how life’s interruptions—illness or new motherhood, loss or lust—can lead us to intimate revelations with others and with our selves. We spend much of our lives in bed—it is a border, a boundary, a haven, and a trap—and the poems in Bed confront and question the very limits of body and mind. In dream and waking, in sickness and sex, in marriage and birth, in grief and death, the bed is a space that can either mark time or transcend it, a place of perpetual becoming and reinvention. Here is a body trying to remember pleasure amidst the material of suffering, a language trying to keep up with a love that begins before speech. The bed in Bed is often an absent center—a missing mind—around which intimacy must dance. Maybe it is the wanted child. Maybe it is the mourned self. Maybe it is your mind these poems must be tucked into to be kept or come alive.