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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
The Listening Skin
Nominee:PEN Open Book Award - (2023)
Hewing close to the bone, the incendiary poems in The Listening Skin explore how an artist dares to dance and create through a pain-riddled body. Corporeal and spiritual, immediately personal and deeply historical, Redmond's latest collection details how generational cycles of poverty, mental and physical illness, and systemic racism impact the self, the family, and the greater African-American collective. Examining the connection between adverse childhood experiences and adult chronic conditions, Redmond's poems arise from her deepest listening, beyond the skin, rooted in the marrow. They speak to the hardship of enduring fibromyalgia and the ongoing challenges of multiple myeloma while rejoicing in survival and the grace of existence itself. Yes, The Listening Skin affirms life and demands the dignity its speaker deserves: "I am full of this past present heat / I carry. / I come to the shore, / but I vacate nothing." This consummate work honors embodied knowledge, all that's heard at the boundary between flesh and air, vacating nothing, determinedly and brilliantly whole.
Book Details
- Publisher: Four Way Books
- Publish Date: Sep 15th, 2022
- Pages: 140
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.91in - 0.39in - 0.60lb
- EAN: 9781954245259
- Categories: • American - African American & Black• Women Authors• Subjects & Themes - Death, Grief, Loss
About the Author
Glenis Redmond is an award-winning poet. She has been a literary community leader for almost thirty years. She is a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist and a Cave Canem alum. Glenis has been the mentor poet for the National Student Poets Program since 2014. In the past she prepared these exceptional youth poets to read at the Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House. She is a North Carolina Literary Fellowship recipient and helped to create the first Writer-in-Residence position at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Her work has been showcased on NPR and PBS and has been most recently published in Orion Magazine and the New York Times. In 2020, Glenis received the highest art award in the state of South Carolina: the Governor's Award. She will be inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors this spring. She believes poetry is the mouth that speaks when all other mouths are silent.
Praise for this book
"When a voice ripens into full measure it is a moment to celebrate, and it was a feeling I couldn't shake as I read Glenis Redmond's superb and powerful new book The Listening Skin. Her poems are finely rendered daguerreotypes of histories entwined, of silences ended. Redmond often uses the image of flight here, and I couldn't agree more;The Listening Skin has that certainty of lift, of knowing of how and when to turn once wing touches wind. The fuse that tells the bud now tells us that we are in the presence of a poet who has unfurled her finest moment."
-Cornelius Eady
-Cornelius Eady
"Its first language was scratched from the land. A powerful, generous, and wise collection. The Listening Skin is an archeological tool that excavated my history, my longing, and my joy.
Now I know I can read the sky. These poems will forever walk with me into the next life and the next and the next... Lifegiving, Joyous, Essential!"
-Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Now I know I can read the sky. These poems will forever walk with me into the next life and the next and the next... Lifegiving, Joyous, Essential!"
-Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
"In The Listening Skin, Glenis Redmond returns to the ancestors and the deep knowing that comes from being ever ready to receive the wisdom they give us. She plants us again in the South Carolinian soil and reaches across decades and continents back to the motherland for historical context, for truth, and for healing. She does not flinch from racism nor the complexities of what it means to carry trauma inside the Black body. These poems are beautifully rendered but don't shrink. I am grateful for the depth and breadth of the music and the keen use of the line in this collection but mostly I'm taken by the way Glenis holds us up to the light. In her sure hands we shine!"
-Crystal Wilkinson
-Crystal Wilkinson