I Always Carry My Bones

It's said that the body remembers, and this book reveals that memories, too, embody. The story of a lived, living body is stored, stored-up until it spills over onto pages full of memories, rage, power, cruelty, survival, love . . . and some stubborn belief that a body will find a way to tell the truth. The poems ask: What did it take to survive? The poems answer: It took every cell moment by moment, accounted for, told on, inscribed, memorized." - Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

"What dwells in land, dwells in you,' - writes Felicia Zamora in I Always Carry My Bones, a book that flows as streams do: relentlessly despite obstructions, despite injustices. Through a boundless range of analysis, Zamora renders trauma in the brown body as a 'lone thistle in the torrent of letters.' Her poems are ecstatic and leap in pursuit of truth and cruel beauties. Zamora's work will remind you that the world is the body' science and psyche. This book is thread let loose and there's no telling which direction Zamora will pull it." - Diana Marie Delgado, author, Tracing the Horse

"A body is a landscape. Ridges outlining a horizon, shared, even as yet remaining particular and positioned. In Zamora's lines, one connects images to narrative threads, peaks to trails, glimpsed like a face lit up 'amid the mulberries at twilight.' The fact of the horizon, light over the ridge, even as it shines unevenly, is grounding: 'we're all born grounded.' We share the fact of an embodiment however asymmetrically available to violences. One carries 'ruptured rules & words & shelter' and often literally. I Always Carry My Bones carries itself, past salvage or triage, the unevenness of light, to imagining - 'we imagine / ourselves every moment' - where the body might carry itself, imagined anew. How the fact of one particular body's history signals all that was, 'memories in the cavities,' but also all that could have been otherwise. And how to imagine an otherwise. 'How, like an egg, a body maps out the body,' but also how it 'questions it, runs broken in the sun.'" - Jos Charles, author, Feeld