Late Self-Portraits

MARY MORRIS is the author of two previous books of poetry, Enter Water, Swimmer and Dear October, and is a recipient of the Rita Dove Award (2008), Western Humanities Review’s Mountain West Writers’ Prize (2019), the New Mexico Discovery Award (2005), and the National Federation of Press Women’s National Communications Contest Award (2021), and is a finalist for the 2021 International Book Awards.

In Late Self-Portraits Mary Morris writes of bodily experiences that cannot ultimately be arrested. Celestial and earthly, peeling back ordinary conceptions of time and space, her poems reach from imagining the interior of the body to experiences of disembodiment. Here, the body is a directional signal pointing outward beyond itself. Her overarching visions, attuned to marvels, create an almost otherworldly sheen in these questing, exacting, deeply realized poems that are radiantly elegant and—in the best sense—unsettling.—Lee Upton, author of Visitations: Stories and Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the BottlesIn the spirit of the great painter Artemisia Gentileschi, the poet Mary Morris, in her luminous Late Self-Portraits, takes on medicine and illness, aging and death, art and spirituality, releasing from the darkness a profound light of transcendence and revelation. She reconciles the body that always betrays us, with the wholeness of nature and our place in it, energy temporal in forms but eternal in belonging. Through masterfully crafted and emotionally complex poems, many of them portraits of herself through the lens of strong women in history, like Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman, and the deconstruction of great men, like Rembrandt and Caravaggio, Morris brings together the soul and physical body into one great mural of the self in cohesion with others, the universe, and the divine.—Heathen (Heather Derr-Smith), author of ThrustLate Self-Portraits is a ravishing memento mori by a poet in whose skilled hands death, lost love, even her own epileptic seizures become occasions for wonder and rhapsody. Mary Morris refuses a faith that sanctifies guilt and renunciation, conjuring instead a new religion where “bloody icons” arereplaced by sunlit mountain temples. She is a poet who sings in the pyre. Like her beloved Joan of Arc, she is “aflame for our world.”—Frank Paino, author of Obscura

• Contents I. Missing Gods of a Grand Mal Salem, America, 1692 Epileptic Appointment with Dr. Siegel Intensive Care Study of a Woman in the Woods Sometimes We Slip Out of Our Bodies Apnea Portrait of Joan of Arc (1412–1431) Canonization of Joan of Arc, May 1920 Portrait of Marie Laveau Marie Curie Portrait of Orpheus, Frida Kahlo, Love & Death Tell Me All Your Secrets Portrait of Caravaggio Painting Death of the Virgin New Religion Winter Chapel Donations, Saint-Sulpice Portrait of Notre-Dame with My Son Testament If You Believe the Seizures Moved On Matadora Portrait of Spain, Cubism The Last Castrato Prayer Flags Ars Poetica Last Tango in Red II. Rembrandt, Late Self-Portrait Our Lady of Broken Waters Fentanyl Portrait of Borges with His Mother Last Supper Portrait of Dylan Thomas Portrait with Francis Bacon, Study for a Running Dog To Basquiat at the Guggenheim Portraits in the National Gallery Inclusion Portrait of an Old Dog with Crooked Teeth Effigy with Horns Effigy with Shell Medusa Modern Colosseum On the Morning That Follows My Death Death of the Botanist Visions of Johanna, jpg #12 All Souls Dinner with Hades Born on Rembrandt’s Birthday Pandemia, Mouth of Insomnia Politico God of Nightfall Act of Faith Notes Acknowledgments