num_pages: 96
description: If you have any interest in the female body or women in sports, you ve probably read Leslie Heywood. The author, a former nationally-ranked long distance runner and competitive powerlifter, has written three academic books, a memoir, and creative non-fiction on issues from body image and competition to the meaning of our body projects, exercise rituals, and obsessions with physical beauty. Here, in her first book of poetry, The Proving Grounds, Heywood explores the roots of these issues more deeply than before, linking them to domestic violence, gender visions, and the ways globalization and consumer culture teaches us to have an instrumental relationship to our bodies and each other, selling an achievement ethos that diminishes us all. With lyric intensity, The Proving Grounds shows how refiguring family and memory works against this diminishment, linking the individual to redemptive communities and histories.
language: English
title: The Proving Grounds
titlecomplete: The Proving Grounds
ratings_count: 4
publisher: Red Hen Press