Believing in Two Bodies

In Believing in Two Bodies, and in a wide array of forms and free verse, Gilbert Allen blends the past and the present within and between evocative poems of national, personal, and family histories. What is striking and peculiar is the lens through which the poet reimagines a past-a past that was already seeing the future, futures that came to be, and some that didn't. It is a rare capacity and expansiveness that pulls off such a time warp, and Mr. Allen delivers bril-liantly time and again.

-Greg Williamson, author of The Hole Story of Kirby the Sneak and Arlo the True

By turns nostalgic and prophetic, Gilbert Allen's new book Believing in Two Bodies is a masterpiece, telling stories that span a lifetime of deeply felt experience and distances both literal and metaphysical. In employing a variety of poetic forms and voices, these poems comment not only on "a lost America, adored / bright spill, remembered chord," but also on our own new century, a world that "has remained / a mystery, an opera in which all / blood must be music in its own sweet time." Awash in time, narrative, and a burning lyricism that will make your heart ache, Believing in Two Bodies is the kind of collection we need to help make sense of our own discordant lives. As the speaker says in "Forty Years North of Dreamland," "You'd never be like them, you told yourself, / and yet you are. Like every one of them."

-Rob Griffith, author of The Devil in the Milk

When I read Gil Allen's poems, my heart slows down. I feel as though the world were more genuine and present and sincere and forgiving. I feel as though the history of meaning is here with me, intense and personal and wide and understandable. Forgive me if these paltry words don't convey what I mean, but his poems bring me a rugged but beautiful peace, and I am thankful for them.

-Bret Lott, author of Jewel