Born in Linconshire, England of Irish parents, Maggie O’Sullivan is the author of over fifteen books of poetry, including red shifts, Palace of Reptiles, “all origins are lonely”, and newly out from Reality Street, Body of Work, which collects all of her early solo collections of poetry and visual texts. In 1993 she collaborated with Bruce Andrews on a work entitled eXcLa, and she is the editor of the 1996 Anthology, Out Of Everywhere: Linguisticallly Innnovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK. Visual artist and interdisciplinarian as well as poet, Maggie O’Sullivan makes words matter, and the matter is radiantly dynamic. She dips and swerves them, cuts and grows them, pulls them, swoops them, divides and slathers them until they croon and careen like gulls or hang like lichen or pose and blend like living paint. She verbs the words, assembling and disassembling — structing, volving, viding, izing — gliding, building, curving, and eliding. She is an avant-primeval pioneer emanating interspecies empathy, a transformative troubador of unabashed corporeal melopoeia.