The Listening Skin

by Glenis Redmond

Overview

Hewing close to the bone, the incendiary poems in The Listening Skin explore how an artist dares to dance and create through a pain-riddled body. Corporeal and spiritual, immediately personal and deeply historical, Redmond's latest collection details how generational cycles of poverty, mental and physical illness, and systemic racism impact the self, the family, and the greater African-American collective. Examining the connection between adverse childhood experiences and adult chronic conditions, Redmond's poems arise from her deepest listening, beyond the skin, rooted in the marrow. They speak to the hardship of enduring fibromyalgia and the ongoing challenges of multiple myeloma while rejoicing in survival and the grace of existence itself. Yes, The Listening Skin affirms life and demands the dignity its speaker deserves: "I am full of this past present heat / I carry. / I come to the shore, / but I vacate nothing." This consummate work honors embodied knowledge, all that's heard at the boundary between flesh and air, vacating nothing, determinedly and brilliantly whole.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954245259
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	09/15/2022
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Glenis Redmond is an award-winning poet. She has been a literary community leader for almost thirty years. She is a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist and a Cave Canem alum. Glenis has been the mentor poet for the National Student Poets Program since 2014. In the past she prepared these exceptional youth poets to read at the Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House. She is a North Carolina Literary Fellowship recipient and helped to create the first Writer-in-Residence position at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Her work has been showcased on NPR and PBS and has been most recently published in Orion Magazine and the New York Times. In 2020, Glenis received the highest art award in the state of South Carolina: the Governor's Award. She will be inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors this spring. She believes poetry is the mouth that speaks when all other mouths are silent.

Read an Excerpt

from Make No Apologies for Yourself
Dear you, make no apologies for yourself
because you are covered in a listening skin
Because every ache you feel is not your own
Because of the bowl of sorrow your mother carries
Because of your father's wildfire moods
Because of how many rivers they crossed
Because of the lynching tree
Because when you enter bookstores
volumes fall off shelves into your open palms
Because you ask questions of the universe
and it answers and opens before you like a page…

Table of Contents

Afro Carolinian 3

Flinch

Forefather 9

Make No Apologies for Yourself 11

Mule 13

From the Mouth of the River 14

Mama Teaches Me How to Survive by Teaching Me How to Dig My Own Grave 16

First Do No Harm or How Not to See 18

Medical History 20

Blasphemy 21

Mechanics of Muscle 24

Out of Body 26

Meat Hook 30

I Stay Sick 32

Fester

Tough Love Comes in the Dozens 37

A Partial Remembering of My History through Haiku 40

Ghosts 43

I Lost My Baby 44

How I Summer (Read Simmer) 45

You Know You Are Not from Here 48

Learning How to Run 50

Boy 53

Hang Man (Woman) 55

Racism Squared 56

Say Carolina 58

Proof of Purchase 60

American Tragedy 62

Flashback

Walking to the Promise Land 67

Cymbee: An Afro Carolinian Mermaid Tale 69

An Exercise in Restraint, a Letter to Ann Cunningham 76

Freedom Spells 1 78

Spells for Zero Captures 80

Every One of My Names 81

More Than What My Mistress Makes 84

House: Another Kind of Field 87

Dreams Speak: My Father's Words 89

Extracting Light or How to Get Here from There 91

A Dollar a Day 97

Flight

Ode to What's Owed a Stitch at a Time 99

When Mama Dreams of Fish or Black Folk Superstitions 101

The Wind in My Name 104

Caged Bird Sings Because 109

Imagining Frida Kahlo as My Life Coach 112

Sketch 116

RSVPing to Lucille Clifton 119

How I Write 121

Editorial Reviews

"When a voice ripens into full measure it is a moment to celebrate, and it was a feeling I couldn’t shake as I read Glenis Redmond’s superb and powerful new book The Listening Skin. Her poems are finely rendered daguerreotypes of histories entwined, of silences ended. Redmond often uses the image of flight here, and I couldn’t agree more;The Listening Skin has that certainty of lift, of knowing of how and when to turn once wing touches wind. The fuse that tells the bud now tells us that we are in the presence of a poet who has unfurled her finest moment."
-Cornelius Eady
 

"Its first language was scratched from the land. A powerful, generous, and wise collection. The Listening Skin is an archeological tool that excavated my history, my longing, and my joy.
Now I know I can read the sky. These poems will forever walk with me into the next life and the next and the next… Lifegiving, Joyous, Essential!"
-Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

"In The Listening Skin, Glenis Redmond returns to the ancestors and the deep knowing that comes from being ever ready to receive the wisdom they give us. She plants us again in the South Carolinian soil and reaches across decades and continents back to the motherland for historical context, for truth, and for healing. She does not flinch from racism nor the complexities of what it means to carry trauma inside the Black body. These poems are beautifully rendered but don't shrink. I am grateful for the depth and breadth of the music and the keen use of the line in this collection but mostly I'm taken by the way Glenis holds us up to the light. In her sure hands we shine!"
-Crystal Wilkinson

From the Publisher