How Our Bodies Learned

How Our Bodies Learned is Marilyn Kallet’s seventh book of lyric poems, offering a collection of love poems and sensual blues that enfold more difficult poems of witness. Each of the three chapters takes a hard look at historical events: the terrorist attack in Paris, November 2015; gun violence in Orlando and San Bernardino; the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. But Kallet is also a poet of dreams and humor. She reassures her readers with songs of healing and resilience. The influence of poets such as Baudelaire, Eluard, and William Carlos Williams adds resonance. “What Power Has Love?” Kallet asks in section One, after witnessing the events in Paris. This power, love: to sing, survive, and to “love harder."