The body is a poem we are writing with every breath, says Townley, who in her dual life has taught yoga for decades. Albert Goldbarth calls Rewriting the Body “affectingly emotional even as it’s formally risky in a very smart way.” Helen Houghton of the Academy says, “I don’t know of anything else like this—a profound meditation, exhilarating to read, extraordinarily beautiful.” H. L. Hix says, “Her poems don’t feel written on the reader’s body, they feel written within it.” Excerpt from the title poem Breath everything is riding on it under the door winter slides its white envelope past due past due as we move from bed to chair and room to room our lives sighing in the cedars strung on backroads to this place where we go in and out breath by breath gravel and ice underfoot Orion overhead