Ex Vivo (out of the body) is a crazy quilt of a poetry book. What could unify such a varied collection of narrators -- inebriated monks, famous painters, suicides, bad girls, and a woman who feels no pain? What could stitch together subjects as disparate as organ donors, middle names, anonymous corpses, keyholes, the "suspicious grieving," pocket knives, and trees? In this collection, the binding thread is language itself, which functions not only as an instrument of communication, but as character, as place, as metaphor, as architecture, as song. Cheryl Dumesnil, author of In Praise of Falling, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize