About When the Body is a Guardrail:
The Texas of childhood is Kara Dorris’s remembered paradise, though it might not be your walled garden. These graceful poems will introduce you to a world you did not know could be so beautiful, so heartbreaking. Here the poet asks, “are we only duty’s bit & whip,” and by the end of “When the Body is a Guardrail” you will understand the answer is “yes, and more.” Replete with cowboy churches, iron bridges, roadkill, flash floods, and guns, Dorris’s poems show us how the more ephemeral feelings can bloom in a hardscrabble world. A family (the sumptuous “we” in “we want/like the breath of air”) manages to develop a code of love and beauty across this piercing book.
–Connie Voisine
Kara Dorris 