Abstract
The erotic impulse is embodied in Incarnate through a passionate wrestling with image and form. Juleta Severson-Baker wills memory and desire onto the page until “the seduction is complete”. The force of these poems is palpable. Readers witness the poet take a polluted river into her “belly like a snake takes a venomous toad”, experience orgasm as birth, and hike above tree line to ultimately “hear what I came to know”. The poetry in Incarnate is a sensuous plunging into the body. Readers will emerge grateful for the book’s manifestation of experience, and for the human body itself.