Cover Art by
Michael Lotenero
Boneshaker investigates the idea of the body as cultural machine, shelter, mirage, or home, as it asks the question: Is blood the answer to the question of one’s history of longing? Are we to find our answers, our sense of place in history, through the transportation system of desire?
An intermittent motif of urban narratives shapes the body of Boneshaker. In Machine Shop of Love, desire is called forth through the history of place in the form of “immigrant steelworkers” and rock & roll, arriving in the body of a woman. She’s found a member of her “tribe,” someone who hears on a cellular level the music that she knows to be her “lifesong,” and she answers with sexuality. This poem sets the stage for a different kind of travel that informs all of Beatty’s poems, whether it is these ancient city voices running through the body of the speaker, the voice of a dead father transporting her to safety, or check-out girls at the grocery urging her to new desire.
But is the body really all it’s cracked up to be—why not just leave it, if only for a while? The title poem breathes a formal quality that Beatty so deftly uses to traverse these fractures. Clipped phrases, slashes, and sections take us to the soliloquy of a young girl learning her body and its place as cultural machine. An unexpected gift of the book occurs when this central speaker’s power materializes in her choice of disintegration. Finally, Boneshaker challenges the protected icon of the mother’s body in Dear Mother, Machine, as Beatty rescripts the birth scene with girders and industrial pulleys.