Pelt

By Sarah Jackson

Sarah Jackson explores the edges of writing in this uncanny book of touch. Tender, haunting, and yet beautifully poised, the poems in Pelt get right under your skin. The collection takes you on an unsettling journey between infancy and adulthood. Slipping from birds to blindness, from hides to hiding, Pelt uncovers the unfamiliar in the everyday. Pelt is written in the dark. It asks to be read through your fingertips. Striking and elegant, subtle and yet full of desire, this is a brilliant debut.'Sarah Jackson's poems are dark, strange stories, immaculately crafted. Surprising, dextrous, sometimes shocking, they compel the reader into uncertain territory. This is an assured first collection from a cool and original new voice' -POLLY CLARK'These poems have a dream-like, hallucinatory quality. Intriguing and mysterious, they transform childhood memory, myth, experiences of place, everything Sarah Jackson draws on for material, into surreal and vivid narratives' -VICKI FEAVER'Sarah Jackson's Pelt is out on its own. At once peirastic and assured, these are poems of disturbing grace and power. They have a compelling strangeness, uncomfortably intimate and elusive at the same time. It is a work of glints and disclosures, by turns gentle and menacing, diurnal and surreal, erotic and deranged. In radical and original fashion, Pelt prompts feelings 'we can neither know/ nor name'. Here is a new voice, a pelting of voices in English poetry' -NICHOLAS ROYLE

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: May 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781780370675

Sarah Jackson

Sarah Jackson is the founder and executive director of Casa de Paz, a hospitality home in Denver, Colorado, serving families separated by immigrant detention. Casa’s family of over 2,000 volunteers provides hospitality for immigrants isolated in and leaving detention as well as their loved ones with visits, meals, shelter, and transportation, joining them in hope and emotional support through the arduous process of reunification. Sarah’s mission is to help end the isolating experience of immigrant detention one simple act of love at a time, which you can follow at www.casadepazcolorado.org.                                                                                          

Book preview

I

If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Henry VIII

Vanishing Twin

For years, I’ve hid

in a cracked hotel

tipping the moors.

I sleep days, among piles

and piles of laundry;

nights, I steal dreams,

wrap them up

in soft white towels,

longing for you,

my duck egg girl,

my vanishing twin.

Do you remember me?

I still feel the ache

of your lidless space,

your imprint on my skin.

The Red Telephone

(after Gary Young)

The boy stands at the bottom of the stairs clutching an apricot in his right hand so tightly that the juice runs down between his fingers. In his left hand he holds a toy telephone. It is red plastic with a curly white cord. It rings when you pull it along the ground by its