All the Possible Bodies

Steeped in the myths we spin about self, family, and nation, the poems of All the Possible Bodies attend to the complexities of violence in America, racial justice, and the intersection of personal and national identity. Pollock's third collection is an emotionally candid and intimate portrait of our varied identities as Americans: the ways we treat one another, the value we assign to each others' lives, and the persistent internal conflict that tugs between our desires and greater duty. With clarity of storytelling, musicality of lyric, and crisp language and image, these poems ask: How do we make peace with our hypocrisy and complicity in a social order that harms us all? Can and should we? Singular in its telling and universal in feeling, All the Possible Bodies seeks to answer these questions through its examination of the complicated emotional and spiritual states characteristic of contemporary American life.

About the Author :
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James, 2018), and All the Possible Bodies (Alice James, 2025). His poems have appeared in publications ranging from American Poetry Review to The New York Times Magazine. Pollock has received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry from Denver Quarterly, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He serves as Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY.

Review :
Recommended by Library Journal "Pollock calls each of our names, and in doing so, promises that that song will keep at bay whatever Clearances may loom, many though they are today. This great, big "us" of All the Possible Bodies guarantees that our own bodies--every single one of them--hold mysteries and powers enough to face, and to overcome, the ruin and the wrack." --Joseph Byrd, Bear Review "In weaving resilience from the delicate fabric of the existential questions permeating the lives of African American men, All the Possible Bodies shimmers with a brilliance that allows the light of honesty and courage to penetrate the dense mass existent in the swirling of race and caste in America. Pollock is a brave poet, gifted with a voice that is the way of articulating his own body and soul while delicately tending to what gives life to all of us." --Afaa M. Weaver, author of A Fire in the Hills "Iain Haley Pollock is a gifted storyteller and All the Possible Bodies is an unflinchingly honest portrait of a mixed-race Black man, a father and teacher in contemporary America. Fed by the past, pitched toward the future, Pollock's voice is one of abiding conscience. In deeply moving poems, he probes the ethical question, what it means to be good, and the existential one, what it is simply to be--scoring myths of the land and self we 'know by heart' and 'stumble through.'" --Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone