Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem

An inventive, poignant and witty collection that speaks to the intricacies of love, both domestic and wild

Winner of the 2024 Cardinal Poetry Prize

Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem is the inaugural winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, selected by renowned poet Robert Pinsky. In free verse and invented poetic forms, Rachel Trousdale explores how the interplay between the mind and body illuminates our most important relationships, whether with other humans, wild spaces, or works of art. Inhabited by crows, yetis, coral reefs, and aliens, these poems playfully examine the intensity and conflict of romantic love; the entropic joys of parenthood; illness and grief; and the ways our physical loves and intangible losses teach us responsibility to the world around us.

[Sample Poem]

Love Poem With Dereliction of Duty

It's true--I like you more than I like
the Marquis de Sade; God that
mid-April afternoon in 1995,
when I said, "let's take a walk"
and you said "sure" and we circled
the New Haven Green saying
who the hell knows what
because if we had seen
all this falling in love stuff coming, we
would have paid more attention;
I just know it took two hours,
past the churches and the porn shop
and over to the cemetery with all
those skull-topped slabs leaning
memorially against the brownstone wall;
round and round we went like marbles
dodging the traps in a game
of labyrinth; and finally back
to campus through that big stone gate
which we entered just as the prof
of the philosophy class I was skipping
came out and I said oh the pain
the pain I can't take it any more
and doubled up laughing

RACHEL TROUSDALE is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Yale Review, Diagram, and other journals, as well as a chapbook, Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone (2015). Her scholarly work includes Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2021) and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination (2010).