“Reader, set aside your ‘safe word’ and enter Loria Mendoza’s stunning collection of poems! The Body Can Tolerate is a haunting testament to true existence. Where the ghosts are both witnesses and actors; where the grit of living is everywhere articulated. Without equivocation. Without ribbons. Visit this sense of place strewn with a gorgeous, visceral intensity of language. Start from the ‘source’ material, commonly referred to as family, then move on to the absorbing maze of passions marking adulthood where the promise of freedom through the agency of love dangles dangerously across each page. Or as the poet puts it: ‘Let me thank you for hiding / all of the knives.’ And hold on reader, because born out of all the marvelously delineated feeling tones of warning in this collection (‘this modest halo / cannot envelop / one more broken thing’) there is a coda. It’s called the future, and the poet shares its spherical music with us.”

—Peter Bullen, author of Wallflower

“‘The way you deform a thing: / love it / and then don’t.’ So too do the poems in Loria Mendoza’s debut deform their readers, the balm of language pulling us in until the rawness of experience startles us back out. These poems attend to love but only alongside its loathing, to relationships but only alongside their fracturing, and to great presences as they turn into great absences, ghosts that the speaker lets haunt them so that readers might bear witness. Sweeping across the confessional, the prosaic, and found forms, Mendoza’s lyric awes with its directness, its immediacy, and its fearlessness. By this, I do not mean unafraid of pain, but rather unafraid to display that pain in act after act of defiance. The speaker claims: ‘The burden / of my biology: / to mother / flesh split / by my own bite.’ These poems are exactly that: born from Mendoza’s very flesh, split open and mothered for the reader’s sake. We are lucky she has decided to do so.”

—Rob Macaisa Colgate, author of Hardly Creatures

“In this boldly intimate collection, identity, memory, and grief swell in a body haunted by history and longing. Body:haunt, corporeal:immaterial. That dialectic and its complications play throughout Mendoza’s triptych of ghosts. Traversing dreamscapes, generational trauma, exile, and love’s undoing, The Body Can Tolerate is a lyrical excavation of survival, something we seek from poetry now more than ever. Here, too, language becomes ritual, and every loss leaves a door swinging open, most often in the dark. Trust Mendoza and walk through it with her.”

—Miah Jeffra, author of American Gospel

“The Body Can Tolerate reveals the delicate ways things can haunt us: grandfathers, an orange, body parts, mirrors, desire, childhood. Loria Mendoza crafts a life cycle of poems that will linger long after you read them.”

—Tomas Moniz, author of All Friends Are Necessary

“The Body Can Tolerate is a feral, fearless collection that ‘burrow[s] like animals, sensing only hunger / to unbury what won’t die.’ Loria Mendoza examines generational ache and its myriad fruits with brutal, lyric tenderness. These poems hold grief, love and survival to the light until they refract into something holy: a poetics of loss, of an artist’s becoming and a woman’s emergent wholeness. Generous and necessary, Mendoza draws us a map, builds us a home in which love might be the deepest cut; but it is still the endgame, the ultimate perseverance.”

 —Christine No, author of Whatever Love Means

“Mendoza’s collection The Body Can Tolerate is a lush and heartbreaking mapping of love and grief. Every movement of the collection reads like a breath holding a damning silence. Mendoza writes about loss with a fractal grace and harsh beauty with emotional notes as fierce as a breaking dam.” 

—Lauren Parker, author of Dark Way Down

“‘i stood alone in my body’—loria mendoza’s the body can tolerate is a subtle but ultimately explosive text.

separated into corridors of exploration, longing, grief, sites of trauma, sites of parental terror, rape, and the ugly, essential therapies of loss and starvation—mendoza parses out paths followed and conversations with shadows along her way.

she stands in thrall of that direct access to a centrality of emotion that an artist-listener can meet. mendoza roars into the vitality she feels—both in and outside her girlbag of blood and bone—in love, aggression, dissociation, through relationships’ sweetness and relatedness’s brutality.

in one particularly powerful moment, she asserts that her work is made in sites of panic, through landscapes where the body breaks into its ghost song—which, as we know, are oftentimes songs of aching, bristling, familial, historical uncertainty. mendoza’s path calls on a kind of personal bravery that most writers are only able to skim. where other artists tickle toward and point to, mendoza leans in, arms reaching, seemingly undaunted by fear of going so far out with little left to return her home.

mendoza journeys in—with a cudgel and a velvet trumpet. she has no map or promise of safety, just a table of contents and a steady circling round overlays of ache and longing. mendoza goes “there”—not unafraid, but determined to ask, and then where!? what have you taken us to!?”

—Linda Ravenswood, author of Cantadora: Letters from California

“Vivid in its lyricism, Loria Mendoza’s The Body Can Tolerate is a poetry of acute and tender witnessing, ‘to unbury what won't die.’ Traversing cunning pavements and crooked bangs, her poems are capacious in their varied forms to hold the unsteady intensities of grief as violence accrues in the speaker’s life. A haunting, image-rich collection of familial strife, of threatened girlhood, of the perils of loving, of woman enduring and persisting despite and alongside her myriad ghosts.”

—Preeti Vangani, author of Mother Tongue Apologize