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Whose Flesh is Flame, Whose Bone is Time
From the coal country of Western Pennsylvania, to Camorra-ridden Naples, to the streets of Damascus before the outbreak of civil war, these lyric poems chart the complexities of national and intimate identity. By turns playful, lamenting, skeptical, bawdy, and aggrieved, they find the human fingerprint below history's erasures, ultimately praising the endurance of the soul ""so ample that, if that is all there is, / she makes a feast of thorns."" V. Penelope Pelizzon was born in 1967 in Massachusetts. A diplomat's spouse, she navigates between postings abroad and her current position as Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published April 3, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 21, 2014
This was utterly engrossing for me. My favorite moments involved its fascination with time and history: from coal mines in Pennsylvania to living in various Arab states, the effects of the past on the present are everywhere.
October 1, 2015
Frequently excellent with occasional missed steps, an engrossing collection with many poems that strike a chord. Blood Memory is the first poem that really seized me, showing me a world of which I was unfamiliar - a winding, lengthy and successful poem. Better still, Fluency is remarkable, with its shattering conclusion hitting absolute bullseye. It would s the finest poem in the book, to my mind.
Bab and Arabesque continue the walk through another tongue and arrive in unexpected places. Lot's Wife also has a sense of the exotic and malign; the poems where Pelizzon pitches herself into another culture are the most resonant in the collection of five sections. The final stand-out poem in this section is Counted on a String of Beads.
The collection rounds off with a short series including To Certain Students which, as an English teacher, spoke to me of my experiences with those students who just capture the love for our subject.
Often good; regularly mesmerising.
Bab and Arabesque continue the walk through another tongue and arrive in unexpected places. Lot's Wife also has a sense of the exotic and malign; the poems where Pelizzon pitches herself into another culture are the most resonant in the collection of five sections. The final stand-out poem in this section is Counted on a String of Beads.
The collection rounds off with a short series including To Certain Students which, as an English teacher, spoke to me of my experiences with those students who just capture the love for our subject.
Often good; regularly mesmerising.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews