Your Body Should Be a Part of the World is a meditation on chronic illness, survival, and community that moves between the intimate space of the sickroom and the messy persistence of nature. In these lyrical and prose poems, Samuels opens the world of her body to the reader, sharing the daily vicissitudes of disabling chronic illness with vibrant attention to detail, every syllable of loss and discovery measured in her words. The body in these poems is not only that of the author, but each plant in her garden, each molecule of air shared among beloveds, each mortal person who may find themselves here in these poems of celebration and defiance. Your Body Should Be a Part of the World is a meditation on chronic illness, survival, and community that moves between the intimate space of the sickroom and the messy persistence of nature. In these lyrical and prose poems, Samuels opens the world of her body to the reader, sharing the daily vicissitudes of disabling chronic illness with vibrant attention to detail, every syllable of loss and discovery measured in her words. The body in these poems is not only that of the author, but each plant in her garden, each molecule of air shared among beloveds, each mortal person who may find themselves here in these poems of celebration and defiance.