"From her first book, Aerial View of Louisiana, published in 1979, Cleopatra Mathis has given us poems that somehow manage to be elegant and visceral at once. What has changed in the progression of the six collections since then-in poetry addressing marriage, the mystery of animals, the delicate and indelible bonds of family, illness, and mortality-is that the visceral quotient has steadily increased, though the elegance remains undiminished. For...

More than three dozen poems describe individual parts of the body and what they do for us and for some parts, such as the face, the verses describe how we communicate nonverbally with other people.