In The Body of My Garden, Rishma Dunlop takes a voyage around the heart in poems that embody the burdens and exhilaration of love. Whether recreating the paradise gardens of Moghul India, or writing an erotically charged poetry of absent lovers, Dunlop uses language in a painterly way, creating sensory images that shimmer with light and humanity while probing the darkness of a sometimes paradoxical and violent world. Ultimately this romantic collection of poems is about seeking grace in the eros and desires of everyday life.

Rishma Dunlop was born in India and grew up in Beaconsfield, Quebec. She has published poetry, literary essays and translations, as well as edited anthologies. Lover Through Departure is her fifth book of poems. She has received awards, fellowships and prizes for her writing, including the Emily Dickinson Prize for Poetry and a Fulbright Research Chair in Creative Writing. In 2011, she was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of Arts and Humanities. She lives in Toronto where she teaches at York University.

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'Grieving, celebratory, these are sensuous songs for the world's body and for our own easily broken bodies. With care she extracts the words of a lover's yearning. Above all, most movingly, most finely, she sets those of a mother aching for the lives of those jeopardized by the cruelties and accidents that would claim them. Lines that startle and please so much you might, like me write them down, think of committing them to memory, wishing they were your own.Ó (Dennis Cooley)