Description
A Heart that Stretches the Length of the Body
Poems by David B. Prather
ISBN: 978-1-963695-86-1 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-87-8 ebook $9.99
February 16, 2027
WINNER of the 2025 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize
Praise for David Prather’s A Heart that Stretches the Length of the Body
David Prather’s A Heart That Stretches the Length of the Body does what a good book of poetry does: it provides an opportunity to resee, to reimagine, and to rededicate ourselves to the wonderful strangeness and the strange wonderment that is the world we think we know. Part insectarium, part sanctuary, part garden of Eden, and part Waste Land, Prather’s collection is both a testament to—and a testimony on behalf of—the mud dauber, zombie spider, hummingbird moth, goliath beetle, and more than fifty other insects and arthropods, each poem like “a piece of honeycomb adrift / in amber.” “Let me be surprised in the garden,” he says, spanning, somehow, both beginning and end times—an entomological Adam/Apocalyptic John of Patmos “clinging to this world in disbelief” yet still convinced that there is “a bit of the sacred / in all of us.” How fortunate for us his heart stretches, also, the lengths of the Earth.—Jeff Hardin, author of A Clearing Space and Watermark, and 2025 Judge of the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize
In A Heart that Stretches the Length of the Body, David B. Prather transforms the imperiled insect world into a map of grief, confession, and wonder. Each creature stands as a portal to something unbearably human. A firefly guides souls through mourning. A woolly bear caterpillar reads winter in its stripes. A garden spider stitches the world back together overnight. Prather’s eye is unflinching: “How long have I hurt / the beauty I touched?” His tenderness is equally fierce. These poems carry fathers and grandmothers, childhood cruelties and adult sorrows, and a body that has known both breaking and becoming. The vanishing of insects becomes inseparable from the vanishing of everything we love. What remains is “a heart that stretches the length of the body,” wide enough to hold it all.—Phillip Shabazz is the author of Moonflower and Middle Ground
In A Heart that Stretches the Length of the Body, David B. Prather tackles big subjects by going insect small, and his bug’s-eye view forces us to see our world in all its complexity. More than a clever conceit, this scientific distance becomes a permission structure, allowing Prather to approach the subjects of an all-too-human life—grief, illness, sexuality, family caregiving, mortality—through the natural world’s oblique intimacy. By the end, the insects have done their work, having taught us to look at each as closely, and as tenderly, as Prather has looked at them.–Renée K. Nicholson, author of Feverdream
A lifelong observer of the natural world, David B. Prather brings together scientific curiosity and lyrical imagination, crafting work that resonates with readers of eco-poetry, memoir, and contemporary nature writing. He lives in Parkersburg, WV, where he continues to explore the intersections of ecology, spirituality, and the human heart. www.davidbprather.com
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