Dear Bodily Press readers,
This is Eliot Cardinaux, Founding Editor of The Bodily Press, writing to thank you ENORMOUSLY, each and every one of you, from the bottom of my heart, for your generous contributions to our year-end crowdfunding campaign. We managed to raise funds well in excess of our goal, which opens the future of The Bodily Press onto new and exciting vistas, including (***drumroll***) the forthcoming publication of poet Andrew Mossin's latest collection, A Common World.
'A seance with the ordinary,' A Common World explores the tensions between the spiritual and phenomenological planes of experience in poems that assert the primacy of perception and the languaged self.
Advance Praise for A Common World:
Even as they are banished (or absconded), gods, as the colors and savor of the world, crowd the evidence of our senses, adding a lustre of their own to the lustre of mere being. In this beautiful collection, A Common World, Andrew Mossin considers long and lovingly of the intricate exchanges—radiance for radiance, outrage for outrage, delight for delight—which sustain us on this side of extinction, and which might very well sustain us farther on. Quite literally, Mossin amplifies the world with a vivid attention. These are generous, glorious poems.
Donald Revell, Canandaigua (2024)
Convening a séance with the ordinary, Andrew Mossin makes of the common world an uncommon medium in which converge holiness and the shifts of light on a field, days that pass without noticing, being and becoming, and the admission that “Everything is less recognizable / than the language that came before it.” These marvelous sequences are as contemplative as they are enervated, as philosophical as they are phenomenological, darkly grooved and borne of faith, drawn from the conviction that “Eternity lies elsewhere,” even as Hermes walks past.
Peter O’Leary, Earth Is Best (2022)
The common world is what encloses and shelters us. It was here before us and will go on long after us. Despite disaster. Shaped by disaster. But also shaped by the forces of tenderness, care, and longing that root us here. The poems in Andrew Mossin’s latest book teem with a kind of phenomenological elasticity: a mapping of the reticulated networks that comprise the common world and its web of fragile connections.
"What can anyone say / but how long and for what purpose?”
These poems reach into a quiet intensity – powerful illuminations of the sacred within the profane, dissolving that antinomy, opening it up, in an irradiating flood of logos entwined with eros. The lines float in their own force fields, curving back around themselves, singing not of completion but a perpetual suspension – “song’s lasting inquiry.” This is a book of deep enchantment.
Patrick Pritchett, Sunderland (2023)
The book is now available for preorder. Copies will begin shipping on February 17th, 2025.
You can preorder here.
With that, I wish us all a steady mind as 2025 begins to unfold. In case you're curious, I recently appeared on the radio (and on a subsequent podcast on Spotify) on the program Poet Talk (WMUA, 91.1FM, UMass Amherst, MA), reading Nathaniel Mackey's poem "Naked Lake Supremacy" from By Bent Light (Forthcoming, Bodily Press, 2025), as well as from my own work. I also engaged in a lively conversation with Amherst poets and cohosts Ellen Miller-Mack and Michael Mercurio, who were both delightful. You can listen at the link below to get a sneak peek (well, maybe a listen..) of Nathaniel Mackey's forthcoming work, which is truly remarkable.
I am eternally grateful for how much of this work you have all made possible this year. Here's to doing everything I can to keep bringing you beautiful poetry long into the future. Thank you.
Yours,
Eliot Cardinaux
Founding Editor
The Bodily Press
