What My Body Knows

Text by Terry Tempest Williams
Artwork by Mary Frank

2022

As a companion to their first collaboration with Eakins Press, A Burning Testament, Terry Tempest Williams and Mary Frank use their deep artistic and moral affinity to bring us What My Body Knows. The Earth is under constant threat. Nature is degraded by human activity in ever more violent and careless ways. Williams's text is as much an urgent acknowledgment of our collective responsibility as it is a moving metaphor aligning the female body, her own body, with Earth. These are subjects that have been the essence of Mary Frank's work for six decades. "It is time to lay our bodies down on the Mother and defend her creation. We breathe—we breathe ourselves back into the insistence of Beauty. Our tears will fall as rain in the desert, in sorrow and relief. We will rise, drenched in joy, and lead. Our bodies on Earth, of Earth, for Earth will be fearless—keening and singing, chanting and dancing, circling the planet in defiance and prayer, as our stay against extinction, both human and wild. We locate the pulse that refuses to cease—because what my body knows is: Life follows life."–Terry Tempest Williams