O Body

(Paperback)

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A collection of moving and tender poems that delves into questions of masculinity, fatherhood, home, and learning to live in and love ones own body.

In his second full-length poetry collection, Chicago-born poet Dan Sully Sullivan considers the male bodyits momentum and privilege when moving through the world, but also its softness and vulnerability. Through these intimate, well-crafted, introspective poems, Sully reveals a speaker who is unwaveringly honest, fragile, and self-conscious regarding his relationship to his body and how it is perceived in the world. As the poems unfold and questions unravel, the book challenges wider social systems that uphold patriarchal notions of masculinity, seeking to achieve a new register of compassion, of self-love.

is also a migration narrative, navigating the physical distances between citiesthe speakers movement between Chicgao and his new home in Bloomingtonand beyond that, the expansive, immeasurable distances within the self. Cityscapes come alive on the page and relationships bloom and deepen as Sully explores love, fatherhood, and family; here, traditional assumptions regarding masculinity and beauty are called into question through the speakers tenderhearted wondering.

offers a much-needed narrative of that shifting perspective. This deeply self-aware and big-hearted book holds space for reflecting on ones physical body and interiority: the complex relationship between the two as well as their intricate and often fraught connections to the wider community and the places we call home.

Reviews

"Dan Sully Sullivans O Body is a feat of tenderness, an act of profound, sweet wondering, the word I mean is care, not only for the home of ones own body, but for the homes ones body might offer other bodies. The shelter we might make of each other. He gets there by going deep with his sorrow and his shame. He gets there through humor and music and story. And when he emerges, he brings with him devotion. To a city, a home, a partner, a daughter, all of them with their own luminous and permanent rooms in this wondrous, this accidental, this precious, O body." Ross Gay, author of Be Holding: A Poem "The voice in Sullys book O Body is intimate and tenderthese are tavern style poems to be shared with friends and strangers over beer and pizza. I could tell you about the voltas in these poems, how the language of images build in the poems and then throughout multiple poems, and its all true, but mostly, I want you to know I read O Body in one sitting. I laughed and gasped and cussed because of how good these poems are." Jos Olivarez, Author of CITIZEN ILLEGAL

Author Bio

Dan Sully Sullivan holds an MFA & MA from Indiana University. His poems & performances have been featured on HBO Def Poetry Jam, WGN Morning News, & National Public Radio. Sully is a three-time Chicago Poetry Slam Champion, a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, the Earl S Ho Award for Excellence in Teaching Creative Writing, & an Indiana University Writer in South Asia Recipient. His poems have recently appeared in Habitat Lit Mag, Southside Weekly, & The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Sullys first full-length book of poems, The Blue Line Home, is available from EM-Press.