Hand & Skull

By Zoe Brigley

Zoë Brigley’s third collection Hand & Skull draws on early memories of the Welsh landscape and the harshness of rural life as well as on her later immersion in the American landscape and her perception of a sense of hollowness in particular communities there. Other strands include the horror of violence, especially violence towards women, contrasted with poems which offer comfort by working as beatitudes or commentaries on life as it exists now, seeking a way of being that is more beautiful, often in relation to her children. There are also epistolary poems, letters to or from real, imagined and remembered women like the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hardy’s Tess, and Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: May 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781780374734

Zoe Brigley

Zoë Brigley is the author of three books of poetry published by Bloodaxe: Hand & Skull (2019), Conquest (2012), and The Secret (2007). All three are UK Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She also has a collection of nonfiction essays: Notes from a Swing State: Writing from Wales and America (Parthian, 2019). Her writing appears in Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, The Chicago Review, Australian Book Review, PN Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. She also researches literature, film, trauma, and violence against women and minorities. She co-edited the academic volume Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives (with Sorcha Gunne). Her research articles appear in The Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Formations, Feminist Media Studies, Gender and Education, and Contemporary Women’s Writing. She podcasts on anti-violence advocacy issues at SinisterMyth.com . She won an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30, and she was listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize for the best international writers under 35. A native of Wales, she now lives in Ohio, where she works as an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University. She is a contributing editor and committee member for Wales’ leading poetry journal, Poetry Wales.

Book preview

ZOË BRIGLEY

HAND & SKULL

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Zoë Brigley’s third collection Hand & Skull draws on early memories of the Welsh landscape and the harshness of rural life as well as on her later immersion in the American landscape and her perception of a sense of hollowness in particular communities there. Other strands include the horror of violence, especially violence towards women, contrasted with poems which offer comfort by working as beatitudes or commentaries on life as it exists now, seeking a way of being that is more beautiful, often in relation to her children. There are also epistolary poems, letters to or from real, imagined and remembered women like the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hardy’s Tess, and Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.

‘The poems in Zoë Brigley’s Hand & Skull are strange-making, unsettling, and thrilling in their originality. Here Brigley bravely confronts what it is to be a woman in a world that sees women as prey, the tautness of fear enacted in the tautness of each line, each word. Like Georgia O’Keeffe, whose work permeates the book, Brigley explores landscape and the body, often braiding the two: ‘I don’t know/ it now, but I am about/ to bend. The snap of a branch, or bone/ under a human hand.’ Hand & Skull is a brilliant book – and proof that Zoë Brigley is one of the best poets writing today.’ – Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

‘Hand & Skull examines the complex relationships between human and nonhuman lives as well as the ways in which gender informs these experiences. Brigley regularly uses epistolaries to establish dialogues, often addressing or personifying women of myth, literature, and history, such as Leda, Edna Pontellier, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Gender violence and violence against animals are often central concerns, but what makes the collection particularly compelling is its refusal to let tragedy be the only note it sings; many of the poems also embrace the complicated wonders of motherhood, of devotion. Hand & Skull dazzled me with its agility and subtlety, its graceful inquiry into how gender, violence, myth, devotion and the natural world braid through our lives.’ – Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest

‘In Hand & Skull the harrowing line between life and death is blade-thin – or rather, the life force and death fact are held together, in this poet’s hands, in the most visceral, affirming and clear-eyed of ways. I admire the dual impulse in these poems to acknowledge systemic violence against women (and other domestic