Body of Work
Tina Cane’s new collection of poems, Body of Work, fuses the personal and the political as it explores the nature of work, poetry, economics, and motherhood. Body of Work is a meditation on memory and change: the changing landscape of the inner and outer life, of family and city, and the nature of personal and cultural identity. Cane reflects upon the “continual mysteries” of her Chinese-American heritage and the complexities of being a person in the world with others.
PRAISE FOR BODY OF WORK
In this innovative and searing new collection, Tina Cane writes of memories amassed “like money banked beneath a mattress.” The result is a landscape of lyrical fragments and potent images that combine and recombine as the book progresses, with the poems weaving expertly through domesticity, motherhood, Chinese-American identity, and the city present and past. With stealth and insight, Body of Work takes us to places unforeseen, urgent, and essential.
—Natalie Schapero, author of Hard Child
ABOUT THE POET
Tina Cane is the author of the poetry collections Body of Work (Veliz Books, 2019) and Once More with Feeling (Veliz Books, 2017), as well as the chapbooks Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante (Skillman Avenue Press, 2016) and The Fifth Thought (Other Painters Press, 2008). Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at the University of Paris IX-Nanterre. She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. Over the past twenty years, Cane has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island. Cane’s poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals including Spinning Jenny, Tupelo Quarterly, Cargo, Two Serious Ladies, The Birmingham Review and The Good Men Project. Cane was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She is the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island.
Tina Cane's website: tinacane.ink
Cover image by
Alberto Giacometti, “Tête de cheval,” 1951
