Abstract

Meat and Bone is a collection of elegies concerned with probing questions of grief, identity and religion in the context of loss. The title poem, "Meat and Bone," an elegy for my sister, explores the tensions between the physical body and the self, and the way loss inscribes itself on both the living and the dead. This long poem moves from the discovery of the body in a freight yard to a photograph of the sister on the evening news, to a tattoo used to identify the body. The poem's culminating question is that of the manuscript as a whole: "How is it we identify a body, claim it more than meat and bone?" Meat and Bone demonstrates a range of styles, open and closed form, lyric and narrative. The collection concludes with a crown of sonnets, entitled "Ichabod's Crown," which resurrects the character of Ichabod Crane from Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow . The sequence exploits Irving's sense of Sleepy Hollow as the land of dreams and resonates with the collection's overall concerns with mind/body and life/death.