The body is a poem we are writing with every breath, says Townley, who in her dual life has taught yoga for decades. Albert Goldbarth calls Rewriting the Body "affectingly emotional even as it's formally risky in a very smart way." Helen Houghton of the Academy says, "I don't know of anything else like this--a profound meditation, exhilarating to read, extraordinarily beautiful." H. L. Hix says, "Her poems don't feel written on the reader's body, they feel written within it."
Excerpt from ReWriting the Body

Breath everything is riding on it
under the door winter slides
its white envelope past due past due
as we move from bed to chair
and room to room our lives
sighing in the cedars
strung on backroads to this place
where we go in and out
breath by breath gravel and ice
underfoot Orion overhead