Winner of the 2013 Michael Waters Poetry PrizeOriginal Bodies explores the primitive mindset, the ancient brain that exists within us all. Most of us don't believe that three crows in a black willow tree portend death or that we can read our lives in the entrails of a pickerel frog or in a hognose snakeskin found draped beside a river bank. But we do wish that we might gain some small control over our destinies. Residing half in the real world and half in the dream world, these poems accentuate the slipperiness we often feel between the corporeal and incorporeal, which is the source of both our fears and longings.