No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation.In Jean D'Amérique's book-length poem, each page is as brief as a hurricane's eye, glimpsing the eerie territory his speaker traverses like an apocalyptic fláneur. His body / a devastation inventory, his stroll a walk / to curse the sidewalks, he peers into the ruins--left by the winds of colonialism, capitalism, war, and natural disaster--and sees a crop of eyes peering back. What others dismiss as broken, for D'Amérique, is a mirror in shards, drinking up all the world's rot / then spilling it all out in diamantine rays. The first of his books to appear in English, this work reclaims the visceral potency of poetry--it is food, it is collars of blood, it is a garment sewn with a thread of sobs.Poetry. Caribbean Studies.