An arrangement of skin : essays
Publication Information
Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint, [2017]
Physical Description
viii, 200 pages ; 22 cm
Summary
"Anna Journey's lyrical and layered arrangement of essays dazzles with her reflections on our shifting selves--the many 'skins' we inhabit in a life. An Arrangement of Skin is by turns beguiling, dark, carnal, and deeply personal. Journey revels in the flexibility and hybridity of the essay form, enriching her idiosyncratic anecdotes with literary and cultural meditations and electrifying the work with a poet's keen ear and canny eye. These essays swerve artfully among topics—a recollection of a personal rupture and ensuing call to a suicide hotline opens into a consideration of taxidermy and lyric time; a mother's penchant for telling macabre stories at the dinner table connects to campfire songs and the cultural importance of American roots music; and a tattoo artist named after a pirate-themed rum reminds us how we inscribe our skins and spirits through the intimate gestures of ink. This is a first collection from an essayist of the highest order."--Amazon.com.
Contents
- An arrangement of skin
- Birds 101
- The Goliath jazz
- Epithalamium with skunk pigs
- The Guineveres
- Strange merchants
- Little face
- A flicker of animal, a flank
- Pangaea for Alice
- A common skin
- Prologue as part of the body
- Retro anatomy of a string bass
- Modifying the badger
- Bluebeard's closet.