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	FURTHER READING


		Poems by Monica Youn
		Ignatz Oasis

		Ignatz, Pop Quiz

		Stealing The Scream

		The Death of Ignatz


		Poems about the Body
		A Hand by Jane Hirshfield

		After tagging the dust your body is made of by Jen Tynes

		Anatomy by Monica Ferrell

		Bodyweight by Matthew Schwartz

		Danse Russe by William Carlos Williams

		For the Man with the Erection Lasting More than Four Hours by John Hodgen

		Ghost in the Land of Skeletons by Christopher Kennedy

		Guessing My Death [excerpt] by CAConrad

		homage to my hips by Lucille Clifton

		Human Atlas by Marianne Boruch

		I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman

		In the Surgical Theatre by Dana Levin

		Slight Tremor by Linda Gregerson

		Textbook & Absence (Anatomy) by Catherine Barnett

		The Tongue by Chris Martin

		These Hands, If Not Gods by Natalie Diaz

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Self-Portrait in a Wire Jacket

by Monica Youn

To section off
is to intensify,

to deaden.
Some surfaces

cannot be salvaged.
Leave them

to lose function,
to persist only

as armature,
holding in place

those radiant
squares

of sensation—
the body a dichotomy

of flesh and
blood. Wait here

in the trellised
garden you

are becoming.
Soon you’ll know

that the strictures
have themselves

become superfluous,
but at that point

you’ll also know
that ungridded

you could no longer survive.

About this poem:

"The wire jacket was a Boxer Rebellion-era Chinese torture device that was used to administer the infamous 'death by a thousand cuts.' I encountered its description in Sax Rohmer's The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu, which I was reading as part of a project on Western representations of Asian culture. More abstractly, for me the wire jacket represented the consequences of living for too long under a system of constraint—how adaptation can involve an irrevocable, though self-imposed, loss of freedom."

—Monica Youn

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