About this item
An elegiac and moving meditation on the ways in which we witness "bodies" of grief and healing.Poems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss.In radiant poems -- set against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events, pop culture, and politics -- Rachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mother's death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The poems take shape in the space where public and private mourning converge, finding there magic and music alongside brutality and trauma. Griffiths braids a moving narrative of identity and its possibilities for rebirth through image and through loss.
About the Author
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and a photographer. She received the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and the MA in English Literature from the University of Delaware. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. Her literary and visual work has appeared in Callaloo, Indiana Review, The New York Times, Comstock Review, Crab Orchard Review, Brilliant Corners, dear camera, Hambone, Mosaic, RATTLE, Puerto Del Sol, The Poetry Society of America, and many others. She is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books) , The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press) , and a forthcoming full-length collection of poetry, Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose, Fall 2011) . She was recently featured as an emerging poet in the April 2011 issue of O magazine, as part of their first-ever poetry issue. Currently, Griffiths teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York.
