“I see no difference,” the poet Paul Celan wrote, “between a handshake and a poem.” At this time of quarantines, of social distancing, many of our familiar physical interactions — a handshake, a hug — have become longed-for memories. Recent books by Uche Nduka and Catherine Wagner remind us that poetry, which can seem more and more dematerialized as pixels on screens, is rooted in the human body: its movements, noises, desires, and articulations — and its interactions with other human bodies. Poetry, in short, can be sexy, as Lord Byron and Edna St. Vincent Millay well knew. And, as Sappho and Whitman knew, no words can address and interrogate sex as deeply as poetry, words hummed and caressed on the tongue, sounded in the body."