Seeing the Body: Poems

About this book

Nominee for the 2021 NAACP Image Award in Poetry 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 poemsset against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events pop culture and politicsRachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mothers death aging authority art black womanhood memory and the American imagination. The poems take shape in the space where public and private mourning converge finding there magic and music alongside brutality and trauma. Griffiths braids a moving narrative of identity and its possibilities for rebirth through image and through loss. A photographer as well as a poet Griffiths accompanies the fierce rhythm of her verses with a series of ghostly imaginative self-portraits blurring the bodys internal wilderness with landscapes alive with beauty and terror. 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. 11 photographs