Poetry. BODY LANGUAGE, a collection of prose poetry unique both in content and design, is actually two books--"Primer" and "Body"--bound "tete-beche" (sometimes called a "flip book," as it has two front covers). Together the books form a diptych investigating the body in language and language in the body-"a provocative, loopic continuum," says Lisa Russ Spaar, "in which prose poems "defining" body parts (The Spleen, The Pituitary Gland, The Pimple, The Thumb) mesh with an abecedarium/cipher concerning topics as various as fate, reality, and phenomenology. With its trope of clue-like instruction and unique, flip-book embodiment, BODY LANGUAGE creates a kind of hybrid detective f(r)iction, an intrepid mash-up of high and low cultures in which the reader is as likely to encounter Rilke and Proto-Sinaitic inscription as Lacan, Film Noir, The Three Stooges, cell phones, higher mathematics, binary thought, and Coyote and Road Runner cartoons."

Author City: Boonville, MO USA

Mark Cunningham received an MFA from the University of Virginia, and he lives now in central Missouri. If time was flexible and he could do whatever he wanted to, he'd be a Paleolithic cave artist. In particular, he would like to sculpt the two clay bison at the end of Le Tuc D'Audoubert. Since that seems unlikely to happen, or to have happened, he's taken to watching rugby on TV. He's also written three books—80 Beetles, BODY LANGUAGE, and 71 Leaves—and, now, SPECIMENS, a book he thinks is, you know, pretty OK.

Reviews and Other Links
http://www.prickofthespindle.com/reviews/2.3/cunningham/body_language.htm