Overview

Memory, story, impressions, witness, culpability, our very humanness course through this book and strip us, via our interaction, of pretense. The poems are language- and image-driven narratives that present us with deep and abiding love, a need for orienting oneself, for respecting the process of orientation. They also dwell in the instantaneous shifts, the sudden changes that simultaneously jar and reassure us. The dreamy realism of the work grounds. Readers are confronted with the unpredictable inertia of life wherein we are challenged daily to find comfort while constantly orienting ourselves. The messiness and complexities of life are often what can bring the greatest joys. There is nakedness, stripping down of pretense, and a love for the primal, emotionally driven self. Some favorite poems are ""Liver of Sulfur,"" ""whatever wilderness contained there,"" ""Arrival: Troy, New York,"" and the final poem in the collection.

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9781949944907

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Reviews

""In weaving resilience from the delicate fabric of the existential questions permeating the lives of African American men, All the Possible Bodies shimmers with a brilliance that allows the light of honesty and courage to penetrate the dense mass existent in the swirling of race and caste in America. Pollock is a brave poet, gifted with a voice that is the way of articulating his own body and soul while delicately tending to what gives life to all of us."" --Afaa M. Weaver, author of A Fire in the Hills ""Iain Haley Pollock is a gifted storyteller and All the Possible Bodies is an unflinchingly honest portrait of a mixed-race Black man, a father and teacher in contemporary America. Fed by the past, pitched toward the future, Pollock's voice is one of abiding conscience. In deeply moving poems, he probes the ethical question, what it means to be good, and the existential one, what it is simply to be--scoring myths of the land and self we 'know by heart' and 'stumble through.'"" --Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone

Author Information

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James, 2018), and All the Possible Bodies (Alice James, 2025). His poems have appeared in publications ranging from American Poetry Review to The New York Times Magazine. Pollock has received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry from Denver Quarterly, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He serves as Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY.

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