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 collision of text and imagery offers an associative autobiography, in which narratives of language, absence, and presence are at once saved, revised, and often erased. Seeing the Body dismantles personal and public masks of silence and self-destruction to visualize and celebrate the imperfect freedom of radical self-love.
"Rachel Eliza Griffiths' mother died around the same time as mine. As we both mourned, she sent me incandescent words to comfort me, phrases that read like invocations, and felt like salves and balms. Her work has always wowed me with its beauty, depth, and luminosity, and there it was also healing me. Radiantly elegiac, this hybrid work of poetry and photographs is one we all need for living, loving, and letting go." – Edwidge Danticat
“These poems are a gift—they remind me that grief can be the ground for transformation. In the midst of Griffiths’ loss, a series of metamorphoses occur—like a fairy tale or a myth, the poet transforms into a spider, then a snake, then a hawk, then prey. Then, like a myth, by the end Griffiths’ has found her true self—all along we have been in the midst of a song of praise.” – Nick Flynn
Official Publication Date: June 9, 2020.
Available:
Indiebound (or your preferred independent bookstore): https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781324005667
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/books/seeing-the-body-poems/9781324005667
Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/seeing-the-body-poems/id1486020187
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/seeing-the-body-rachel-eliza-griffiths/1133534064
Books-A-Million: https://www.booksamillion.com/p/9781324005667
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324005661/
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Rachel_Eliza_Griffiths_Seeing_the_Body_Poems?id=GqW6DwAAQBAJ&hl=en_US