The Feeder

Book excerpt: Poetry. Women's Studies. Body Positive. THE FEEDER by Jennifer Jackson Berry is a book of the body--an unblinking eye, a voice kicking open door after door on hushed topics of infertility, pregnancy loss, and how real bodies, in all their failings and flailings, seek and find pleasure. The poems are as secrets shared between good friends, so raw and dangerous, we can't look away. "IN THE FEEDER, Jennifer Jackson Berry gives us what we crave. In an authentic, incisive voice, she instructs:'... don't swat the wasp. / Let it happen. Let the sting happen.' And the sting does happen in these slicing poems of the body in delight and distress--poems of the fat girl speaking, poems of infertility, of sex and more sex, of debilitating loss. Berry delivers what so many others only strive for: the devouring of what's gone bad and the opening up of each remaining body to see it glisten."--Jan Beatty