Margaret Wack is the author of The Body Problem (Orison Books, 2023), winner of the Orison Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in EcoTheo Review, Ruminate, Passages North, Grist, Arion, Strange Horizons, Climbing Lightly Through Forests: A Poetry Anthology Honoring Ursula K. Le Guin, and elsewhere.

Books by Margaret Wack:

Other poems on the web by Margaret Wack:
"Do Not Ask for Metamorphosis"
"Happy Endings"
"Pasiphae"
"The Saint Of Small Things, Weeping"
"Spring Dwindle"

Margaret Wack's Website.

Margaret Wack on Twitter.

About The Body Problem:

"Visceral, vivid, voracious—what struck me most in Margaret Wack's stunningly lush The Body Problem is how organic it is. Organic in the way of the densest heart of an old growth forest, where green bubbles up from decay and wood sinks into soil in a relentless cycle of wild abundance. 'You must be born each instant and rot each hour,' Wack declares as her images build on themselves like amino acids, proliferate like cells, and transform like 'flowers of fungi will bloom upon your bones.'"
—Erin Rodoni

"The Body Problem is a field guide to a world fluttering between promise and ruin, where ripeness is always turning the corner into rot. There is too much to harvest, too much to hunger for. Like Tantalus, we reach and reach, but 'cannot possibly close our hands upon the sweetness of it.' And the problem with time is that there is never enough of it. The problem with the body is that it will inevitably 'rot like a peony, over-plump and full of starving ants.' So be it. If these poems feel timely right now—if it feels like the world is pulsing with losses beyond calculation—Wack reminds us that some problems are timeless. We are no more or less cursed than we've ever been, no more or less desperate for beauty or survival. We steady ourselves with myth, and we will become the myths that steady whoever comes next."
—Claire Wahmanholm

"The Body Problem comes 'caught on the edge / of a new century like a colt on its raw legs in the first darkness.' Margaret Wack has given us a work in which love and instinct offer return from the letdowns of what we've been calling enlightenment. Reading this book means realizing you've had 'your back pressed up against the world,' the same world we've learned to 'navigate by touch alone.' Like the rain the poet's speaker describes, The Body Problem won't clean you of yourself, but offers a world swallowed in its own thick atmosphere."
—C. T. Salazar