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No Way in the Skin without This Bloody Embrace

Jean D'Amérique

$20.00
SKU:
9781946433947
UPC:
9781946433947
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Published by:
Ugly Duckling Presse
Translated by:
Conor Bracken
Pub date:
09/15/2022
Binding type:
Paperback
Pages:
120
ISBN:
9781946433947
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Longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation.

In Jean D'Amérique's book-length poem, each page is as brief as a hurricane's eye, glimpsing the eerie territory his speaker traverses like an apocalyptic fláneur. His "body / a devastation inventory," his stroll a "walk / to curse the sidewalks," he peers into the ruins--left by the winds of colonialism, capitalism, war, and natural disaster--and sees a "crop of eyes" peering back. What others dismiss as broken, for D'Amérique, is a mirror in shards, "drinking up all the world's rot / then spilling it all out in diamantine rays." The first of his books to appear in English, this work reclaims the visceral potency of poetry--it is food, it is "collars of blood," it is a garment sewn with "a thread of sobs."

Poetry. Caribbean Studies.