Grace Stansbery

Dear Beast Loveliness: Poems of the Body By Tim J. Myers ISBN 978-1609641238 BlazeVOX Reviewed by Grace Stansbery In Dear Beast Loveliness, Tim J. Myers explores the physical and spiritual existences pertaining to the body. “The most profound of all human experiences is simply having a body,” he writes, and “of all our universal realities, it’s certainly the most fundamental.” Myers’ poetry rejects the preconceived notion, propagated by religious extremism, that the body is “essentially foul”, along with more modern conceptions of it as “pure machinery producing the illusion of self.” Riding the gray area (in typical 2013 fashion), Dear Beast Loveliness’s poems waver back and forth between wet dream and in-body-etherealism. In one representative poem, Myers utilizes concepts like Voyager’s robot sensors in conjunction with the tiny heartbeat from a fetal monitor to ask the question: “Which [is] more mysterious, and which came from further away?” The book is [...]