The body is where it all begins

Marcy Rae Henry sings so much more than the body electric; she sings a cuerpo bilingue, a body gone awry amid perimenopause, a body nevertheless moonbright and halfnaked among the sagebrush. Henry peppers the poems of this scintillating chapbook with evocative housings and tangible accoutrements: a golden scarab in Egypt, the telltale signs of downsized childhood ("dry foods, frozen fruit, / packets of vegetable soup"), the "pastel art and fake plants" of a mammogram waiting room. Henry's lyrics bridge English and Spanish like the open-ended promise of a multilingual lifespan, which is to say they are pointed and timely and yield surprising portmanteaus: "vaccine which is vacuna / in Spanish and sounds like a cow in a cradle." Her speakers confuse want for want ("quiero querer means i want to want / but could also mean i want to love") and wound (as in "tightly") for wound (as in "painful"). They traverse the planet in search of-and escaping from-lovers like time-traveling globetrotter