The Skin of Mercy

by Dana Littlepage Smith

In this third collection Dana Littlepage Smith combines extraordinary imagery with a quiet, but precise observation to produce poetry that is both bold yet delicate. The poems in this collection see Smith using her spiritual perceptiveness not abstractly, but to search out innovative visceral details, so ‘asylum’ ‘may lie / in the light rug this woman carries, / in the frayed edge of cloth / she will wrap herself in’ (Sanctuary) and hope ‘lands like the periwinkle blue moth’ (Better to travel hopefully). These are poems that are at once visionary and quotidian.

64 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2012

About the author

Dana Littlepage Smith is an American poet whose previous collections are Women Clothed with the Sun (2001) and Black Elk Dances for Queen Victoria (Cinnamon Press, 2007). Her work has been widely anthologised and published in magazines, including Stand and Iota. Dana now lives in Exeter, where she works as a teacher.