Selected from the country’s leading literary journals and publications, Beautiful Flesh gathers eighteen essays on the body, essentially building a multi-gender, multi-ethnic body out of essays, each concerning a different part of the body. Essays include Dinty W. Moore’s “The Aquatic Ape,” Katherine E. Standefer’s “Shock to the Heart, Or: A Primer on the Practical Applications of Electricity,” Matt Roberts’s “Vasectomy Instruction 7,” and Peggy Shinner’s “Elective.” Echoing the myriad shapes, sizes, abilities, and types of the human body, these essays showcase the many forms of the genre: personal, memoir, lyric, braided, and so on.