In a Body by Emily Hockaday

To read In a Body by Emily Hockaday, for me, was to come to terms with the conflicts human souls have with our bodies throughout our lives. It makes us starkly aware that we are not the same as our bodies, that we might exist outside of our bodies, but acknowledges that, as living beings in a material world, we do not.

The speaker in these poems explores frustrations, joys, limitations the soul has with the body in a way that calls attention to our souls’ separateness from our bodies, or the desire, at times, for that to be so. The body that is, at times, a burden but that, in its pain and limitations, encourages voice: I know the pain / is real. I say it aloud. In the poem “Body as Neural Network,” speaking pain makes sensation tangible. The body in these poems can be any or one particular body, and throughout the collection, Hockaday lands on important truths both simple and universal, as in “Body in Opposition”: Always the pain returns. / I have to remind myself / it is the same for all of us. These poems consider the body in its multitude of states, how in each state, the soul/mind, if those are the same entities, bears its own enigmatic frustrations with its body.

All this talk of the soul is not to suggest the collection skirts everydayness: Hockaday presents a view of the world through walks in the woods, by the bay of a wildlife refuge, under the Amtrak. We sit with the speaker in the therapist’s office. We stare at her daughter. We contemplate along with her what it means to be in a body of a woman, a wife, in the body of a mother, a daughter who’s lost a father, a body of the sober, a body of the chronically ill. In a body that will expire in the body of the world.

It isn’t long into the collection the reader comes to understand the speaker’s frustration with her body. In “Body After Dry Downing,” the poem praises the watery, elastic, both unlikely, properties attributed to something as concrete and inescapable as the body, and lands on a reference to the Ophelia of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: She wanted to drown / somewhere outside herself, a soul in grief, wishing itself from corporeal limitations, escaping the tangible world into a world both scientific and unimaginable.

In “Self Portrait,” the speaker incorporates the collective “we,” maybe the wider world, into the view of something larger than the poem’s title suggests: Even as we move through time, / we move through the Galaxy. The molecules / cannot be stopped in their momentum or metamorphosis. Bodies become part of a larger system in which everything and everyone don’t necessarily age, but change. The soul seems to forgive the body undergoing change through child-bearing, addiction, loss, partnership, and illness. Thankfully Hockaday doesn’t wrap up or even come to peace with the tension between the unbound soul and the body that binds it, as to do that might deny our human, bodily experiences.

She wanted to drown somewhere outside herself.

Near the end of the collection, “Holy Body” celebrates the nurturing of rain, blueberries, and of grass that, needing rain, “bites the feet.” A poem rife with the struggles of the body explores the exhaustion of the jaw grinding in the night amidst the wonders of nature, culminating with a line insinuating bodily betrayal: What good is this mouth? / After everything, I still can’t speak up. Hockaday holds the contradictory experience of the body up to us. Here is full catastrophe living.

Perhaps the most encompassing of the collection, “Body as Body,” celebrates the body as both foe and instrument of pleasure, as something the soul is beholden to, all in one line so direct and searing: I have considered that I am it, which is the conundrum and beauty of the whole collection. But what Hockaday finds as salve is the human connection—other bodies—in the touch the speaker requests from her partner, in the joy of her daughter’s laugh at the beat of her heart. Nothing is simple in the body. Hockaday’s collection is an example of poetry doing what it was meant to do: revealing and reveling in the complexities of our existence.

Through the lens of physics, nature, and woman, Hockaday explores the intimate movement of the body into and away from itself. This is a collection of a body constantly becoming, and it ends with the speaker’s body with her daughter as it fights the cold, the most alive bodies might ever be, rich and earthy… sweetness just before decomposition.

In a Body by Emily Hockaday is a concentrated fleshing out of the body and soul communing in the human experience, reaching every body.

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Sarah Cedeño’s chapbook of essays, Not Something We Discuss Often, was published by Harbor Editions in November 2022. Her story collection, The Grand Scheme of Things, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions in 2025. She lives in Brockport, NY, with her husband, two sons, some old ghosts, and a dog. She teaches writing at SUNY Brockport.