About The Body Problem
Winner of The 2021 Orison Chapbook Prize
From the publisher:
The voice in Margaret Wack's remarkable debut chapbook is drenched in myth and but also with the knowledge that all myths must fade in time, like every body, like every culture—like humanity itself. A vatic magnetism pulls the reader in as these poems reckon with impermanence and the impending end of the Anthropocene, but also unapologetically revel in the numinous viscerality of each present moment, insisting on making new songs to the end.
Praise for The Body Problem
"Visceral, vivid, voracious—what struck me most in Margaret Wack’s stunningly lush The Body Problem is how organic it is. Organic in the way of the densest heart of an old growth forest, where green bubbles up from decay and wood sinks into soil in a relentless cycle of wild abundance. “You must be born each instant and rot each hour,” Wack declares as her images build on themselves like amino acids, proliferate like cells, and transform like “flowers of fungi will bloom upon your bones.” Just as life, in all its vast variety, is composed of the same handful of elements, these poems are made of timeless ingredients—blood and honey, bone and ash, the flint and fire of fairytale and myth—yet each blossoms into a uniquely beautiful organism. And together, they form a mesmeric world, teeming with ruin and rapture."
–– Erin Rodoni, author of And If the Woods Carry You
"The Body Problem is a field guide to a world fluttering between promise and ruin, where ripeness is always turning the corner into rot. There is too much to harvest, too much to hunger for. Like Tantalus, we reach and reach, but “cannot possibly close our hands upon the sweetness of it.” And the problem with time is that there is never enough of it. The problem with the body is that it will inevitably “rot like a peony, over-plump and full of starving ants.” So be it. If these poems feel timely right now—it if feels like the world is pulsing with losses beyond calculation—Wack reminds us that some problems are timeless. We are no more or less cursed than we've ever been, no more or less desperate for beauty or survival. We steady ourselves with myth, and we will become the myths that steady whoever comes next. Like the world they describe, Wack’s poems hum with both romance and tragedy, full of a richness that “seeps in like honey wine, gets gold all over everything.” They urge us to love the world in whatever perverse, brutal way we can. To love the world in the way we always have."
–– Claire Wahmanholm, author of Redmouth
"The Body Problem comes “caught on the edge / of a new century like a colt on its raw legs in the first darkness.” Margaret Wack has given us a work in which love and instinct offer return from the letdowns of what we’ve been calling enlightenment. Reading this book means realizing you’ve had “your back pressed up against the world,” the same world we’ve learned to “navigate by touch alone.” Like the rain the poet’s speaker describes, The Body Problem won’t clean you of yourself, but offers a world swallowed in its own thick atmosphere."
–– C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking
Reviews of The Body Problem
Reviewed in Muzzle Magazine:
“Does anything prepare a person for the sensate glory of a failing world better than inhabiting the body of a girl, a wonder always moments from rot? Margaret Wack’s baroque and sumptuous first chapbook, The Body Problem, winner of the 2021 Orison Chapbook Prize, whispers, moans, and shrieks to answer that question. Ecological elegies bookend the chapbook, while its center brings concerns with love and ruin to the female body. This is a first collection from a daring and artful new poet that captures contemporary themes of Anthropocene decay and femme body discomfort with a bitten intensity of language. Ruby red with blood and juice, Margaret Wack’s collection mesmerizes.”
Reviewed in Strange Horizons:
“Wack is an excellent poet with a stunning command of language and an impressive arsenal of references—ones which she doesn’t parrot but rather adapts and changes in her poetry. The Body Problem, released by Orison Books in 2023, is a collection that, in my mind, struggles against the reality of the world (and of our bodies) in order to present stunning poetry that ends up being about survival most of all.”
Reviewed in Sage Cigarettes Magazine:
"The poems possess a linguistic magnetism which lures in readers […] The Body Problem is an enchanting, mesmeric world of its own. Its poems adeptly balance the personal and the universal–a difficult technique for any poet to master. Its allusions to myth, philosophy, and basic instincts for survival and self-preservation remind readers of the timeless problems individuals and humanity face. Nonetheless, no matter the devastation these poems portray, they are ripe with the promise of a better self after one emerges from the ruins.”
Reviewed in Full House Literary:
"Wack’s writing exudes a sense of targeted and sustained linguistic craft […] The Body Problem is a strikingly written collection.”