Praise for Beast Body Epic

Katy Wimhurst on GoodReads.com

photo by Heather Babcock

Thanks to Katy Wimhurst for this glowing review on GoodReads.com.

“Body Beast Epic (2023) is a powerful and visceral book of poetry about Amanda Earl’s near-death experience in 2009—a lung collapse, sepsis, the removal of colon, and hallucinations in the ICU. In it, Earl inventively combines different forms of poetic expression to tell her disorientating story—visual, lyric, narrative, experimental, prose. Each section starts with a wonderful visual poem made using the quote of a different writer, like HD and Dante; it then continues with a distinct poetic perspective on an aspect of the experience. In the first section, for instance, we meet the protagonist, Rot, who is about to encounter Death, ‘the moocher’; and the last section is a fascinating 84-point list of the experience’s basic chronology. Showing Earl’s expansive range as a poet, the 90 pages include literary allusions to e.g. Humpty Dumpty, Heathcliff and Frankenstein; moments of intimacy and brutality; and flares of Earl’s characteristic wit and imagination (I loved how when she sees a janitor come out of an operating room with a large amount of black hair, she imagines them operating on a bear). Highly recommended.” Katy Wimhurst

You can purchase a copy of Beast Body Epic here. Thanks to everyone who has purchased the book so far!