Hand & Skull - Softcover

Zoe Brigley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780374720 ISBN 13: 9781780374727

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2019

Synopsis

Zoe Brigley's third collection Hand & Skull draws on early memories of the Welsh landscape and the harshness of rural life as well as on her later immersion in the American landscape and her perception of a sense of hollowness in particular communities there. Other strands include the horror of violence, especially violence towards women, contrasted with poems which offer comfort by working as beatitudes or commentaries on life as it exists now, seeking a way of being that is more beautiful, often in relation to her children. There are also epistolary poems, letters to or from real, imagined and remembered women like the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, Thomas Hardy's Tess, and Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin's The Awakening.

About this title

Review:

Brigley gathers up all the fragments of what it is to be a woman and weaves them together in this stunning collection which cuts and heals in equal measure. --Laura May Webb in Wales Arts Review on Hand & Skull

Brigley's voice is powerful, compelling, a force to be reckoned with, but what makes this collection particularly poignant is her refusal to let grief and tragedy become all-consuming... This poet writes with grace and honesty, boldly confronting what it means to be female in a world that conflates women and prey. While Hand & Skull is concerned with violence, particularly violence against women, it is also a celebration of comfort, joy and light. --Mari Ellis Dunning, New Welsh Review

Hand & Skull examines the complex relationships between human and nonhuman lives as well as the ways in which gender informs these experiences. Brigley regularly uses epistolaries to establish dialogues, often addressing or personifying women of myth, literature, and history, such as Leda, Edna Pontellier, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Gender violence and violence against animals are often central concerns, but what makes the collection particularly compelling is its refusal to let tragedy be the only note it sings; many of the poems also embrace the complicated wonders of motherhood, of devotion. Hand & Skull dazzled me with its agility and subtlety, its graceful inquiry into how gender, violence, myth, devotion and the natural world braid through our lives. --Amie Whittemore

About the Author:

Zoe Brigley (Thompson) grew up in Caerphilly in the Rhymney Valley of Wales, and is now an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University in the US. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003 and received a Welsh Academy bursary in 2005. Her first book of poems, The Secret (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008. Her second collection, Conquest (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, as is her third collection, Hand & Skull (Bloodaxe Books, 2019). She also researches violence against women, and is co-editor of a volume of scholarly essays, Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives (Routledge, 2010), and author of a book of non-fiction essays, Notes from a Swing State (Parthian Books, 2019).

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1780374720
• ISBN 13: 9781780374727
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64