From Where the Rivers Come: Poems

　　From Where the RiversCome never flinches from the body's inevitable vulnerabilities, nor fromthe soul's response to the emotional collisions of living in a body. Fromsideshow performers, such as the "Anatomical Wonder" and "Human Pincushion,"who suffers from a congenital immunity to pain, to victims of torture andclinically depressed strangers, Solly gives us exacting portraits of human lifeat the most fragile and resilient extreme. He doesn't hesitate to include hisown pain: the loss of love, his mother's death, his own medically reconfiguredbody.

　　Richard Solly, however, doesn't limit his poetic pilgrimageto descriptions of pain; rather, he advances the ancient argument between bodyand soul-how one can often become a stand-in for the other. The body, Sollysuggests, is not simply a container or tabernacle for the superior and distantsoul. The linkage between body and soul is much more fierce and immediate, ashe writes, "I gave birth to you, / bound your wings to my shoulders." Here is alanguage of sung gratitude for "the wider body of the river of coffee andirretrievable losses," including lilacs and lentils, the nurses who stop byafter midnight, walks around a city lake, even the priests who read Solly hislast rites, not once, but twice.

　　Richard Solly received summa cum laude mastersdegrees from Iowa State Universityand Hazelden Graduate School of Addiction Studies. His writing has receivedfour fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush FoundationArtist Fellowship, and the Loft-McKnight Award. He currently works as a senioracquisition editor for Hazelden Publishing. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota,with his daughter.