Parts of love - Dina Paulson-McEwen - Bog

New York City native Dina Paulson-McEwen's debut poetry collection, Parts of love, (Finishing Line Press, 2018) was a 2017 finalist in the Finishing Line Press New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition. Parts of love explores interstices in loving, delving into themes of relationships, living, the body, and desire, and includes prose and lyric poems. "Paulson-McEwen plays with paradox, excavating moments of hope amongst the seeming ruins, "that signal you sent - / a dagger of fire / amongst all the black - / will bring me home /". These poems are not merely to be read, but to be dissolved into with a whole and vulnerable spirit," writes author Robin Richardson. Parts of love speaks to (an) experience of love from/within a woman's body. Author Marthe Reed writes, "Simultaneously site of desire, sexual fulfillment, ritual, and reproduction, the girl body [in Parts of love] is figured also as site of disobedience, investigation, erasure, trauma of the medicalized self. Paulson-McEwen's response? Go into dream, into ritual, into love-making and self-love, resistance writ as love-cum-beloved...Tantric, celebratory, bewitching, Parts of love takes l-o-v-e as a new divine/beloved, site and center of worship, ecstatically evoking love's manifold quotidian forms against any and all erasures."