A Map for Exiting the Body

This book is so delicious it makes me hungry. In A Map for Exiting the Body, Jin Cordaro employs a deft sleight-of-hand and layers of wry metaphor to create back roads, detours, surprising vistas of wonder. I'm haunted by phrases like "one small shelter of purpose" and "the numbers of days since your hope was last seen." Or try a title like "Acerbic You Does Not Like Laid Back You" or "When I Go Too Long Without Reading a Poem." There's humor lifting the weight, always, with such a genuinely endearing tone.    -Naomi Shihab Nye, Tender Spot: Selected Poems

The speaker of Jin Cordaro's wise and transporting poems knows "the surge of a sewing machine whirring late into the night." She will tell you how "we drive through the towns of our mistakes." When you read A Map for Exiting the Body, you may find yourself stunned by a sibling who wears "the skin of a horse beneath her clothes" or the warning that "darkness always expands." In these splendid poems you will discover a song for a broken umbrella and a husband whose cell phone has engulfed him in flames. You will find yourself in the company of a truly gifted and original poet.   -Faith Shearin, Lost Language

A Map for Exiting the Body is a metaphysical escape manual for centuries of ancestral trauma stored in the body. Jin Cordaro's original, delightful images leap and laugh and sway above cataclysms of grief, like a garden on the roof of a "sorrow factory," or a "mother's personality still hanging in the closet." The emotional work is complex and dangerous, yet through sensory contact with the intricacies of dailiness, Cordaro seeks safe passage toward something like freedom, something like grace. -Chad Sweeney, Little Million Doors