Love Like a Body Carried to Shore

Love Like a Body Carried to Shore, from award-winning poet Abigail Chabitnoy, is an invitation to listen. This ecologically and emotionally charged collection explores continuity through water and weather, through the intimacies of relation, where knowing is a bodied verb. Moving with a tidal rhythm across its unsectioned form, the book weaves ancestral memory with myth. It stays with the work of environmental witness and extends its meditation to the permeability between human and animal. Domestic spaces blur with the mythic. The self emerges inside the landscape.

Engaging Indigenous and Judeo-Christian cosmologies, Chabitnoy reconfigures these frames into openings toward mutuality. Amid ecological and cultural precarity, the poems enact reclamation, seeking moments outside of causal time, where future catastrophe loosens its hold long enough for the body to remember what it is to love the world and be loved by it.

[sample poem]

NOT A DRILL

The berries were not
ripe we plucked and
burst on our tongues.

We bent low to thumb
each foreign body that
opened

held our breath to
record erratics
glissading
from the mountains we
left standing
the sigh of icemelts

the rust we smelled
already monument.

It was love we
pressed our fingers
through
the honeyed fungus 

love we let the
shallow rooted
spruce stand 
where no one had need 

love we sang to
chase the bears
from the 
brush 

we projected 
on the iceberg 
when the dark was 
sufficient 

love we refrained 
from throwing
stones at the
muddied lake. 

Sea weeding  
through green 
it was love  
we did not pluck 
the unsightly
growth  from the  
supple  
earth.