From the Introduction, by Debra Marquart
"In Animal Magnetism, Kim Roberts investigates, in language as rich, complex, and nuanced as the body itself, the unlit interiors of physical and emotional anatomy...Borne out of the author's own deep searching following a serious illness, each poem, each line, feels deeply earned...Here the narrator functions as a trained docent, leading the reader on a private tour of wonders and curiosities that document the early explorations of medicine and anatomy, in which the inner workings of the body were first being opened up to the human eye. While these poems are beautifully made and sometimes funny or painful, they are also brimming with information. Do you know who the world's largest shoe belonged to? Have you seen the bones of the American Giant, measured at seven feet, six inches at the time of his death at age twenty-three? Do you know where you can view a preserved section of President Garfield's spine where the bullet almost entered? The answers to these and many questions are contained within Animal Magnetism."
Excerpts from Animal Magnetism by Kim Roberts
BLOOD LETTING The Physick House, Philadelphia
I turn my head away as the needle
enters that delicate fold of the inner elbow,
then look back to watch the syringe
bloom with my dark agency.
Another lab test: again my doctors
want my fluids, want to know
what stories reside in my blood.
At the Physick House, I learned
we have a total of 166 ounces
in our bodies. Physick,
the “Father of American Surgery,” assumed
twice that amount. A second-floor display
shows the knives he used,
the basin with the half-moon cutaway
where a patient could rest her arm.
Now his house is a museum,
all his tools and vials and paraphernalia
lined up in glass cases, and labeled.
I want to know what the labels don’t reveal:
who were the patients who laid their arms
over this basin, while Physick leaned close
to cut their inner elbows, that same
fragile furrow, and let their stories flow.
I think I see a little left, a rusty stain,
a life there, hidden.
IUDs Dittrick Medical History Center, Cleveland
Wheels, whisks, wishbones,
silhouette of a tiny pine.
Birds in flight and fiddlehead ferns.
The uterus is a magic place:
dark as a cave, it accommodates
any shape we insert:
circles and snakes, beetles
and bows, fossils and fleurs de lis.
Some are even shaped like a uterus
in miniature, amulets for warding off
miniatures of ourselves. Leaves
of a plastic ginko tree unfurl—
no end to our genius, its infinite contours.
On this scaffold we build
a barren language in plastic letters:
expandable O’s, flying V’s,
X’s like antlers, and a range
of two-handled T’s, eager to get to work.
PORTRAIT OF HIPPOCRATES, OR BUQRAT from The Falnama of 1703, Topkapi Palace, Istanbul
O augury seeker, ...............know and be aware… .......In the book of divination,
Hippocrates rides the simurgh, ...............a mythical bird, .......as he returns to his home
carved from emeralds ...............on Mount Qaf. .......With his white turban,
scholar’s dark beard, ...............and bright orange robe, .......he looks over one shoulder
and strokes the bird’s ...............golden tail feathers .......as she flits through an azure sky
between eddies of clouds. ...............Healer of the sick, .......Builder of the first hospital,
Master of alchemy, ...............astrology and magic, .......I have prepared myself
for your prognostication ...............with bathing and prayers, .......opened the book in my blindness,
opened my heart in hope ...............and placed my body, .......my wounded body, in your hands.
