Throughout seven years of teaching in urban schools, the author discovered that the most effective ways to teach difficult literary texts was to refer to students' out-of-school activities. In other words, to connect the "leaky edges of the "social outside"" with the "individual inside" is to create a curriculum of "embodied relationships." This article discusses the ways he taught "Canterbury Tales" (Geoffrey Chaucer), the play "Twelve Angry Men" (Reginald Rose), "The House of Mirth" (Edith Wharton), "Fences" (August Wilson), and "Siddhartha" (Herman Hesse) to various groups of low-achieving secondary students in an urban high school in a large northeastern city. The author states that his primary concern as a literature teacher was not whether the students would memorize and comprehend the literary pieces, but rather that they would be able to make connections to the characters in the texts, understand the history, comprehend the events, and, thus, create embodied experiences of literature.