Robert Bly's prose poems have a parallel hallucinatory quality [to the drawings by Gendron Jensen that illustrate "This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood"]….

"My beloved is to me as a cluster of camphor," we read in the Song of Solomon (1:14); and the Ark, God told Noah (Genesis 6:14), was to be made "of gopherwood." The Ark was by some accounts an allegory for the body, and that's all the explanation you're going to get in these pages about what it's like to be alive in a body; in it, yet through it mysteriously part of everything else material….

Bly is attempting to write down what it's like to be alive, a state in which, he implies, not all readers find themselves all the time—certainly not all readers who lack the luck to live in rural Minnesota, where a voice isn't always trying to sell you something...