No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace

By Jean D’Amérique

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation.

In Jean D'Am?rique's book-length poem, each page is as brief as a hurricane's eye, glimpsing the eerie territory his speaker traverses like an apocalyptic fl?neur. 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'Am?rique, 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1946433942
• ISBN13: 9781946433947
• Release Date: September 2022
• Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 4.9" x 7.1"