Animal Magnetism

In Animal Magnetism, winner of the 2009 Pearl Poetry Prize, Kim Roberts delves into the mysteries, anomalies, and afflictions of the human body. While caring for a terminally ill friend, she began visiting medical museums, exploring the age-old effort to understand the body's workings and cure its maladies. But it wasn't until she faced her own illness that she began to translate what she found there into these finely-crafted, deeply personal, and historically revealing poems. From Hippocrates to the dawn of modern medicine, the arcane exhibits she encounters not only serve to remind us of how far we've come in this age of advanced medical technology, but how much further we have to go. For who among us has not experienced the betrayal of the body, whose unseen corridors still harbor the seeds of disease and disorder?