Books by Melissa Kwasny

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today comprises two interwoven seriesΓÇöone of linked prose poems called ΓÇ£Another Letter to the SoulΓÇ¥ and one of individual lined poems that explore the connection between anima and animal. The volume speaks to and questions the ancient concept of the soul and its contemporary manifestations, including the damaged soul, the American soul, and the blind, gagged soul of history.Melissa Kwasny does not define the soul in traditional religious terms, but in a shamanic, perhaps ecological sense, as the part of being that continues its existence after death. The poems in ΓÇ£Another Letter to the SoulΓÇ¥ point inward, addressing the human soul directly, while the individual lined poems search outward, sensing the soul in the plants, animals, rocks, waters, and winds that surround us.