Kerri French is the author of Every Room in the Body, winner of the 2016 Moon City Poetry Award. Her poetry has appeared in Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, The Journal, Mid-American Review, Barrow Street, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nashville Review, DIAGRAM, PANK, Best New Poets, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, among others. A North Carolina native, she has lived in Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and England and holds degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC Greensboro, and Boston University. Instruments of Summer, her chapbook of poems about Amy Winehouse, is available from Dancing Girl Press. She lives and writes outside of Nashville, TN.
“You’re told your baby will be/ born but maybe not alive.” These lines drill to the marrow of Kerri French’s Every Room in the Body, which narrates, in gorgeous lyrics, a particularly high-risk pregnancy. Here the body is both home and captor. There’s a terrific strangeness in the language, yet the movement of each poem is so deft, so controlled. Every Room in the Body is a visionary, haunting book.
— Maggie Smith
