These Pages Once Were Skin

Author: Laurie Price

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil (2024)

"Propulsive yet indeterminate is the wondrous and suspenseful sense of these poems. Speaking the multilemma of living in these times where everything seems to be slipping away and at the same time converging in tsunamis of cataclysmic disaster, the poems are intimate and yet abstract, embodied but evanescent: a phenomenological study, perhaps, of our minds in the Anthropocene, scrambling for certainty but embracing our lack thereof. Acquiescent inner rebellion laced with biting humor astutely observes the calamities swirling around the globe. “What if I say I am a perfect violation/of what’s expected of me?” These pages that once were skin will be skin again, always singing like the drowned girl’s bone in the old ballad, turned into a flute that wails the story of her death. Dazzling word-dances lead us to intuit a way forward in accepting both a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of language! You go, grrrl!" —Maria Damon