Body Taken

Lisa Beech Hartz is the author of Bold, Marvelous, The Goldfish Window, and These Kismets. She directs the non-profit Seven Cities Writers Project, which brings writing workshops to underserved communities. She guides workshops for men and women in two city jails.

"An engrossing, multivalent book, The Body Taken is as much an elegy for lost friendship as it is a collection of brilliant ekphrastic poems on the work of Francesca Woodman, the influential photographer who died tragically at 22. Lisa Beech Hartz explores art's transformative processes fearlessly, and through poems of intellectual clarity and emotional power, photographer and poet each emerge an Everywoman, the specificity of their images and experiences paradoxically leading to the universal."—John Hennessy, author of Exit Garden State and UMass English department faculty member "Lisa Beech Hartz writes with a language so precise the poems feel carved out of history with a spooky clarity. Hartz responds to the photographs of Francesca Woodman as a way to reclaim the existence of women who disappear even as they are present. To call these poems ekphrastic is to diminish the genius of their scope. Hartz's eye does not merely sharpen the art of Woodman's photos, it calls the photos into being and intersperses them among the poet, the poet's mother, and a girlhood friend."—Jessica Cuello, author of Yours, Creature "In these unflinching and finely wrought poems, Lisa Beech Hartz tends to the forces that burnish and diminish the body: the reveries of youth, a cancer diagnosis, love's gravity, the intimacies of grief. The emotional power of these poems is amplified by the resonant and gorgeous language. These poems are heart-rich, deftly written. Hartz is an immensely gifted poet, and this collection is remarkable."—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine "The Body Taken is haunting. In a gorgeous sequence of lyrics and erasures, Lisa Beech Hartz resurrects the mysterious life and photography of Francesca Woodman. We wander the poems and the poems wander us, asking, 'Girl. Where have you been? /Her slim arms gesture toward a half-/open door, all darkness within.' Like all the best ekphrasis, Hartz's poems not only bring art and artist to life but take us beyond them. Woodman and her spectral self-portraits converse with Hartz's own moving meditations on girlhood, coming of age, loss, illness, danger and desire. 'I find myself/parsing calamity,' the poet notes. 'What is /a woman for?' Each poem sets loose a series of ghosts and girls who appear and disappear before our eyes, unforgettable and forever out of reach."—Kirun Kapur, author of Women in the Waiting Room