[03/11/25] Zammit, Abigail Ardelle: Leaves Borrowed From Human Flesh

Etruscan Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 11, 2025

Publisher Marketing: This collection offers a subversive take on poetic language, destabilizing the boundaries between genres, and shoving the confessional self off-center. In Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh, the centrality of the self is displaced by the raw power of place and the female body's attempt to search for meaning within the vast spatial topography that confronts it. Poems which take their inspiration from landscapes in South America, Europe, Australia and Africa, beckon the reader to experience natural beauty and climatic collapse through a language that is subtly but unashamedly political, spanning love, mortality, violence, and abuse, but always returning to the word as a source of power and regeneration. Ultimately, this is a collection about language's ability to remain buoyant-through-change, and about poetry's unquenchable thirst for otherness - an intense desire that, no longer satisfied with traditional models of representation, must remake itself by inhabiting the page as both canvas and visual field.