The Resurrection Trade

“For me The Resurrection Trade is very much like being given a rare chance to have dinner with one of the most interesting conversationalists in the world. These poems are delightfully eclectic, learned and wise, and it is a privilege to have this fine book as guest in the house.” —Ted Kooser, former US Poet Laureate

“The resurrection trade,” the business of trafficking in corpses, is an old trade, one that makes possible the art of anatomy and, as poet Leslie Adrienne Miller discovers, the art of her own book. Miller delves into the mysteries of early anatomical studies and medical illustrations and finds there stories of women’s lives—sometimes tragic, sometimes comic—as exposed as the drawings themselves. These meticulously researched and rendered poems become powerful testimonies to women’s bodies objectified and misunderstood throughout history. Miller’s sensuous and harrowing fifth collection brings a new truth to what she calls in one poem “the strange collusion of imaginary science and real art.”