Thalia Field's inventive new book explores the very condition of being incarnate: how, invested with human form, we experience both suffering and ecstasy from childhood to adulthood to death. As with her previous book published by New Directions, Point and Line (2000), Incarnate defies categorization: it "industriously works the sparsely populated and as yet under-developed borderlands between poetry, fiction, theater, and contemporary classical music" (Review of Contemporary Fiction). In Incarnate: Story Material, she continues to reach beyond borders, examining how, trapped in our own stories, we act and react in a world of solidity, perceiving something "other" close at hand. With its amazing variety of poetic and prose-like forms, driven by a fierce and playful intelligence, Incarnate: Story Material challenges and moves us.