In the long limbo of post-viral syndrome, Julia Guez aptly frames the recursive paralysis of pandemic rhetoric, whose seeming transitions always arrive at the same uncertainty: "and then what / and then / what, what / then." The Certain Body captures life with illness-how the body moves through disease and rests in the liminal space of otherness. Following the speaker through a harrowing and disorienting SARS-Cov-2 infection, readers witness the poet's gradual refortification as Guez traverses all facets of sickness: its mercies, its pleasures, its gratitudes, its reliefs, its gorgeousnesses. Probing, sharp poems centering an awareness of human ephemerality answer the words of Viktor Shklovsky: "And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony." In "If Indeed I Am Ill," Guez writes, "These sonatas, these scores, tell me / what of them will last when everything falls away-" Through these lyric expressions, Guez shows us not just how art can heal but how healing is art, a modality of acceptance, the meaning in the process, a mosaic of imperfections that creates and embraces what is.

Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in the city of New York. Her essays, interviews, fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in Guernica, POETRY, The Guardian, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, and Kenyon Review. She has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation as well as a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America New York; she's currently the senior managing director of design and implementation. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers. You can find more of her work online at www.juliaguez.net.