Body Am I

How the way we perceive our bodies plays a critical role in the way we perceive ourselves: stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands, anorexia, and other phenomena. The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I, Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and amputee fetishes. Costandi explains that the brain generates maps and models of the body that guide how we perceive and use it, and that these maps and models are repeatedly modified and reconstructed. Drawing on recent bodily awareness research, the new science of self-consciousness, and historical milestones in neurology, he describes a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders that result when body and brain are out of sync, including not only the well-known phantom limb syndrome but also phantom breast and phantom penis syndromes; body integrity identity disorder, which compels a person to disown and then amputate a healthy arm or leg; and such eating disorders as anorexia. Wide-ranging and meticulously researched, Body Am I (the title comes from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra) offers new insight into self-consciousness by describing it in terms of bodily awareness.

Our predominant experience is that we have a body, with which we work, eat, dance, make love, have pleasure. But sometimes when we are sick, tired, or in pain, our perception changes; then we experience that we are our bodies. That is the experience which Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel explores in this unique book.

From Rae Armantrout to Adam Zagajewski, In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth is a chorus of voices from around the globe and across generations. A compendium of some of our beloved poems from our favorite poets, this slim anthology is the perfect companion for cafés, road trips, bathtubs, shuttle expeditions, and any other situation in need of the genuinely human. Included are freshly translated masterpieces--originally published in Poetry International--from poets such as Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico García Lorca, and Charles Baudelaire, along with new work from contemporary practitioners such as Kay Ryan, Jane Hirshfield, Derek Walcott, Kwame Dawes, Valzhyna Mort, and James Tate.--Publisher's description.

I Am the Boss of My Body explains to children exactly as the title suggests - that they are the boss of their bodies! It explains to children what they should do if someone touches their body. More importantly, it explains what children should do if someone touches their private skin. I Am the Boss of My Body is an interactive book. Children are encouraged to repeat important phrases and are instructed to draw their own pictures to assist in bringing meaning and value to the messaging within the book. I Am the Boss of My Body is a non-threatening way to educate children about threatening situations.

"Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body can be a tough doctrine to get one's head around, and Gerard-Marie's devotional approach in Who Am I? Theology of the Body in Prayer is a welcome contribution to the ongoing conversation about the meaning of the human person. Hopefully readers will bring an attitude of prayer to their reading of this book, and make progress in seeing Theology of the Body as a livable reality that cannot be confined to the pages of a textbook."-Matt Swaim

If poetry is a place to question, I Am a Body of Land by Shannon Webb-Campbell is an attempt to explore a relationship to poetic responsibility and accountability, and frame poetry as a form of re-visioning. Here Webb-Campbell revisits the text of her earlier work Who Took My Sister? to examine her self, her place and her own poetic strategies. These poems are efforts to decolonize, unlearn, and undoo harm. Reconsidering individual poems and letters, Webb-Campbell's confessional writing circles back, and challenges what it means to ask questions of her own settler-Indigenous identity, belonging, and attempts to cry out for community, and call in with love. Edited, with an introduction by multiple award-winning writer and activist Lee Maracle. Praise for I Am a Body of Land: "Poetry awake with the winds from the Four Directions, poetry that crosses borders, margins, treaties, yellow tape warning Police Line: Do Not Cross. Poetry whose traditional territory, through colonization, has become trauma and shame. Unceded poetry. Read. Respect. Weep." --Susan Musgrave, author of Origami Dove "Shannon Webb-Campbell's work forces readers out of polite conversation and into a realm where despair and hard truths are being told, being heard and finding the emotion strength to learn from it, find out way out and embrace our beauty as Indigenous women." --Carol Rose Daniels, author of Hiraeth and Bearskin Diary, winner of the First Nations Communities READ Award and the Aboriginal Literature Award.

Loving your body is hard to do. Project Body Love is the story of my quest to find acceptance, respect, and maybe even love for my body after spending a lifetime counting calories and drops of sweat. What followed was a two-year series of experiments that had me mining the depths of my past, dismantling the effects of Diet Culture on my self-worth, taking up bellydancing, posing for nude photographs, and other daring feats of self-exploration. Far from being a shiny tale of self-actualization, Project Body Love explores the complexity of being a fat person in a thin-obsessed world, and concludes with an entirely new perspective on the elusive body love - one that was surprising, even to me. This is my story, and so much of it is also the story of millions of other women. And so. I wrote this for every woman who has spent too much time trying to make herself small. I wrote it for every woman who wants to love her body, but can't figure out how. I wrote this for a world that needs its women committed to revolution and sovereignty and joy, not eating more salad.