Amazon.com description: Product Description: With its dazzling array of forms, wry wit, and compassionate vision, Allison Joseph’s Mortal Rewards is a singular celebration of all that’s wondrous and difficult in our corporeal lives, a tribute to the “lust that drives a poet’s pen.” Here you’ll find an ode to cursive penmanship, a roadside hotel aubade, a distance runner’s apologia to her toes, a catena rondo set in a women’s locker room—even a curse poem for the clothing manufacturers who tyrannize women: the consumers for whom “fit / is one big elusive variable” and the laborers who “hunch over machines // for an unliving wage.” Mortal Rewards reveals a poet of an intimate grace and incisive social conscience.
—Jane Satterfield
What are the “mortal rewards” of Allison Joseph’s book? They are also “moral rewards”: doing what one loves and living life with the appropriate passion for the occasion, whether it is mourning for someone one barely knows, sleeping in a hotel bed, or writing without any guarantee of permanent fame. As usual, Joseph’s voice is direct and clear; she is a standout with form; and she uses it to show how, in our mortal bodies (because we are both trapped by them and freed by them), we illustrate the struggle and satisfaction of poems written in traditional form. Robert Frost writes of “The Road Not Taken,” Joseph of the road she has taken. Whether or not society appreciates that road does not take away from its satisfactions. Joseph is her own woman, poet, and person, describing “our bodies / the only interstate we know.” As a result, she has work that will endure.
—Kim Bridgford