From Where the Rivers Come: Poems - Softcover

&;From Where the Rivers Come is a saving grace. What heaven to read a poet who finds a way to make room for it all, not just the suffering, but the joy hard won.&;&;Jim Moore

From Where the Rivers Come never flinches from the body&;s inevitable vulnerabilities, nor from the soul&;s response to the emotional collisions of living in a body. From sideshow performers, such as the &;Anatomical Wonder&; and &;Human Pincushion,&; who suffers from a congenital immunity to pain, to victims of torture and clinically depressed strangers, Solly gives us exacting portraits of human life at the most fragile and resilient extreme. He doesn&;t hesitate to include his own pain: the loss of love, his mother&;s death, his own medically reconfigured body.

Richard Solly, however, doesn&;t limit his poetic pilgrimage to descriptions of pain; rather, he advances the ancient argument between body and soul&;how one can often become a stand-in for the other. The body, Solly suggests, is not simply a container or tabernacle for the superior and distant soul. The linkage between body and soul is much more fierce and immediate, as he writes, &;I gave birth to you, / bound your wings to my shoulders.&; Here is a language of sung gratitude for &;the wider body of the river of coffee and irretrievable losses,&; including lilacs and lentils, the nurses who stop by after midnight, walks around a city lake, even the priests who read Solly his last rites, not once, but twice.