Publications

The body is its own landscape within Shelby Newsom's new poetry chapbook Flesh Memory. Between nature and self, boundaries collapse. Newsom's poems hold physicality as their subject, and awaken through imagery: a barbed stinger, silk stockings, or half-eaten fruit. Choking on the rind of an orange can test one's stability. Poison ivy becomes a threatening force in a relationship. One can break through inhibitions by participating in the wild: "the river's cool slip / is a sensation soaked in me." From the Rocky Mountains to the Texas Hill Country, to Rust Belt towns, the speaker seeks clarity in other people, but finds it only in the quietude of the natural landscape. Newsom populates this lush new collection with high leaps of lyric, distinctive challenges to form, and considerations of what it means to be both queer and agentic in the contemporary moment.