The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life

This collection of essays by nationally known poet Julia Kasdorf "probe," in her own words, "the tangled threads of gender and cultural/religious identity as they relate to the emergence and exercise of literary authority." Her ten essays, accompanied by forty-two engaging illustrations (from a nude by Titian, to family photos, to a famous image of Marilyn Monroe) and a dozen of her poems, focus on specific aspects of Mennonite life. Often drawing from historical episodes or family stories, Kasdorf pursues themes of martyrdom, landscape, silence, the body, memory, community, and the struggle to articulate experience with a voice that is both authentic to the self and a conversation with her traditional Mennonite and Amish-Mennonite background.