Congratulations to Beltway Poetry Quarterly's Kim Roberts on the publication of her award-winning book, Animal Magnetism.I've read Kim's previous books, and have long admired her searching intellect, originality of subject, and craft. Here is the elegant title poem from the collection:

ANIMAL MAGNETISM
Discovered by Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815)

Come, Doctor,
with your iron rods,
your magnetized water,
and bathe me. Touch me
with your fingertips,
and spark my animal essence.
Tune the fluid of my soul.

Across planetary space
electricity leaps,
the vital ether that sustains
our human organs.
In balance, the soul transmits
freely an ecstatic song.
Unbalanced, the ether
loses its harmony, harbors
sickness and decay.

I want to be healed!
Bring on your devices,
strap me in your wires. Bewitch.
Make the dry channels surge
as they once did, call down
the very powers of the black planets.
Mesmerize me.
###

Franz Anton Mesmer's theories of animal magnetism and mesmerism (a forerunner of therapeutic hypnosis) were dismissed in his own day, but in this incantatory poem, Roberts conveys the fierce hope and willingness to submit when a patient is desperate for cure. "Tune the fluid of my soul" the narrator implores, and the poet proceeds to pull the musical trope throughout the poem ("ecstatic song", "ether loses its harmony") in short, breathless lines. The sick narrator demands physical connection. "touch me with your fingertips" she says. "I want to be healed!" By any means necessary - devices, wires, "the very powers of the black planets."

When the author was diagnosed with (now cured) cancer, she began to travel to medical museums like The International Museum of Surgical Science, The Physick House, and The National Museum of Health and Medicine. She absorbed impressions of methods and tools of healing through the centuries. A quick look at the poems' titles serves as a tour: Blood Letting, The Skull of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, The Apothecary Doll, The Fluoroscope. The implements and curiosities give rise to questions that the poet answers with insight and tenderness toward the fragility of life. The body is where we live, she reminds us.

The "Imaginary Husband" poems are among my favorites. They provide an intimate, unblinking look at what occurs when a partner is sick -- the cling and distance, the loss and hope. In the poet's hands, a detail such as the husband's curls become "the climbing ivy,/they shake in the wind,/ and quiver from a pivot." The threshold states are the unlit corners of experience, like the interior of the body itself, that Roberts illuminates, sometimes with humor, always with sensitivity, and the startling, apt poetic device.

Animal Magnetism  is a very smart book, as rich and complex in subject and subtext as it is in the music of its language. Highly recommended.