Day Cracks Between the Bones of the Foot

Poetry. Art. "Where sinew and bone lapse into shadow, Jesse Nissim suggests that the body is ’the constant motion of being.’ This poet’s entanglement with embodiment is impassioned, perplexed, intent. With each iteration, the ’body replicates / the body / unfolding.’ Opening toward resolution? No. When Nissim asks for the body’s address, she is not seeking a location so much as a means of speaking, a directionality that creates relation. The real, in this poetry, is not the empirical. Here, instead, is a tour de force of desire in which the body transcends its mortal limits to become a form of testimony."—Elizabeth Robinson

"To have to work toward embodiment, to have to use language to do so—Jesse Nissim’s marvelous poems take this paradox for granted. Their intelligence is as generous as the word cleave: made of both body and mind and the alleged divide between them, both somatic experience and her verbal rendering of it. This poet bravely pursues adequate language to convey embodied knowledge despite all the forces (including her own will) that would have her reject her body as site of self-sovereignty, insight, and power. ’The nonverbal reigns,’ the poet admits, ’despite my effort to word it.’ Thus though these poems show restraint and deep control at the level of the line, they move with associative wildness and surprise at the levels of image and narrative. The honesty and grace of Nissim’s work lie in how precisely each poem records the ’multi-rhythmic / never-ending / wish’ to write her body without allowing language to betray it."—Brian Teare

"In her nuanced, magnificent poems, Jesse Nissim sings the body beloved, the body unwell, the body in flux and in motion. I so admire these lines’ assured sway from the delicate to the brutal and back. There’s a permeability there, a willingness to attend to the spaces between things, to the gaps in our very selves. What a beautiful, urgent book!"—Heather Christle