Through The New Body by Isabella DeSendi

Selected and introduced by Evie Shockley

DeSendi’s poetry is generous. It tells you where you are, even when that where is a space of limbo....We are in limbo, because we are in the world in the body of a girl-becoming-woman, an American with Cuban matrilineage, a sufferer who causes suffering. Autobiographical or not, these poems give us a figure who seeks to understand her own distress in relation to that experienced by women of different ages and backgrounds.

—Evie Shockley

Isabella DeSendi is a Cuban-Italian poet and educator whose work has been published in Narrative, Leveler, Small Orange, Two Peach, The Ekphrastic Review, and The Grief Diaries. She was recently selected as a finalist for The 2019 Frontier Digital Poetry Chapbook contest judged by Jericho Brown, and has also been named a finalist for the June Jordan Fellowship and Narrative Magazine’s Annual Poetry Prize. Isabella is the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship and holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University in New York City where she currently resides and works in finance.

Edition: 500 copies of the winning books were printed by the Prolific Group and designed by Gabriele Wilson, with covers by Dan Funderburgh.