Volume 55 Issue 2 | Fall 2025

Bodies In and Out of Control
Guest Edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham

“This themed issue of The Iowa Review grapples with the dynamic forces of bodies in and out of control.” —from the Editor’s Note

On our cover: Katherine Bradford, Fear of Waves, 2015. Oil on canvas, 84 x 72 in. Courtesy of the artist and CANADA gallery. Photograph by Joe DeNardo.

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Fiction

Poetry

Nonfiction

Molly Higgins | Born for This
John Janelle Backman | Tic

Tippy Rex | The Short Corners
Cyrus Stuvland | Letting the Want In
Jodie Noel Vinson | Cadavre Exquis
Rebecca Stanfel | An Apostate’s Journey with Medieval Saints

Visual Literature

Harriet Y. Woodford and Steven Erickson | The Torso Project
Lisa Huffaker | Erasures from Fascinating Womanhood
Ashwini Bhasi | The Cuff

VK Preston | Dipytchs and Pieces of Loss

Editor’s Note   

Bodies In and Out of Control

Losing control can be both terrifying and exhilarating, in part because staying in control is serious business in most societies. The control of the body, in particular, is a cultural imperative and anxiety. In the European tradition, Descartes’s cogito both dissociated the mind from the body and marked the intellect as superior, the source and site of Being; in the Cartesian view, the mind was a means to conquer the messy unruliness of the body’s passions and needs. But even in the non-Western world, this dichotomy persists. In the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the soul is described as indestructible—“it does not die when the body perishes”—whereas the body is inconsequential, fragile and replaceable. The Gita goes on to praise the yogi who attains “perpetual joy of contract with Brahman” through disciplining the body, limiting its indulgences in food and sleep and engaging in “avowed celibacy.”

Indeed, containing the sexual appetite is linked with godliness in many religious traditions: Catholic priests and nuns take vows of celibacy, as do many orders of Buddhist monks and nuns. Augustine’s Confessions identify lust as sinful because it leads to a loss of rational control. As the feminist philosopher Susan Bordo puts it, “That which is not-body is the highest, the best, the noblest, the closest to God; that which is body is the albatross, the heavy drag on self-realization.” The general idea is that sensuality is a distraction that must be repressed if one is to truly attain spiritual awakening. And sensuality is gendered, so that bodies deemed female, with their capacity for pregnancy and birth, their ovulation and menstruation, their mammaries and breastmilk, are most closely linked with instinctual, irrepressible sex, while bodies read as masculine are culturally aligned with authority, discipline, and invulnerability.

But no body is invulnerable, and bodies are not easy to control. These categories—like male and female—and their attendant stereotyped characteristics are unstable, fluctuant, vulnerable, often unmanageable despite one’s best efforts. This themed issue of The Iowa Review grapples with the dynamic forces of bodies in and out of control. It’s a topic that could take us in many different directions, and while there was no way to span the entire gamut in a single publication, the stories, poems, essays and artwork in this issue are engaged with varying perspectives and experiences of bodies and control, or the lack thereof. In Will Alden’s “Matthew,” for example, a couple struggles to conceive even as their bodies refuse to cooperate; in Silvia Spring’s “Cuentos de Hoy,” the end of a longed-for pregnancy has unforeseen ripple effects. For the poet Jessica Lawson, a pregnancy loss is a source of internal, reflective sorrow:

belly is an open not
a shut, uncradle

Femininity and masculinity are body projects, the ongoing and iterative products of practices, as we see in Scott Delgarno’s “Patina” and from a different angle in Colin Pope’s “(because I didn’t know what affection meant between two men).” Challenging the binaries of gender through intentional body reconfigurations can carry collateral consequences; Cyrus Stuvland and Charlie Sorrenson trace these corporeal shifts via trans narratives in fiction and nonfiction. And sometimes a loss of control is imposed upon the body, through illness or aging or disability or violence, or through the medical and legal discourses of our times, all of which intersect with race, class, gender, sexuality, nation and religion. These intersections are brought into sharp relief in, for instance, Chimezie Chika’s “The Silent Boy” and Ashwini Bhasi’s “The Cuff,” and again, in a different register, in Aaron H. Aceves’s “Visions.” The body and disability is another powerful motif in this issue. John Janelle Backman recounts the way her tics have been a source of shame as well as succor; Molly Higgins reflects on how her disability has complicated her visions of motherhood. For Harriet Y. Woodford, confronting cancer and undergoing a double mastectomy needed to be reified through a visual chronicle of body transformation, documented in these pages. The trauma of violence against women in its multiple manifestations is the site of rage and sorrow in Claudia N. Cortese and M. Privitello’s “Epistolary Poems.”

This issue’s theme is the body, flesh and blood, and yet in today’s world the body is inextricably yoked to technology. Elizabeth Vidas’s inventive short story “iWalden” transports us to an eerily familiar lockdown situation where people live in pods and “minder” online, where virtual and real-world relationships play out in unexpected ways, and where Thoreau makes a cameo appearance.

As I reflect on these topics and revisit these works, I’m grateful to Lynne Nugent, who first invited me to guest edit this issue of TIR, and to Katie Berta and Alicia Wright, whose support and guidance were invaluable in compiling this powerful collection of art, prose and poetry. In addition, my work would have been infinitely more difficult without the insights and appraisals of the University of Iowa students who read submissions and alerted me to the ones aligned with this theme. My thanks, too, to many writers and artists who submitted their deeply personal and potent work: writing is a vulnerable process and risking a submission even more so. I want to honor that here.

It’s also important to recognize that even as I write this introduction to the “Bodies” issue, we are witnessing the politics of bodies in and out of control, of embodied vulnerability. Political violence continues against bodies around the globe, devastating entire regions. Wildfires and other climate events have decimated vast tracts of land and displaced peoples. Vital health care is no longer available to those who desperately need it in many parts of the world. Continuing to write, make art, think and engage with bodies and their control remains a crucially important mission as we reckon with these and other cataclysmic events.

—Meenakshi Gigi Durham