Today’s GalleyCrush is Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Seeing the Body, forthcoming from W. W. Norton on June 9, 2020.
Perfect pitch: “An elegiac and moving meditation on the ways in which we witness ‘bodies’ of grief and healing.”
First lines: “She died & I— / In the spring of her blood, I remember / my mother’s first injury.”
Big blurb: “These poems are a gift—they remind me that grief can be the ground for transformation. In the midst of Griffiths’s loss, a series of metamorphoses occur—like a fairy tale or a myth, the poet transforms into a spider, then a snake, then a hawk, then prey. Then, like a myth, by the end Griffiths has found her true self—all along we have been in the midst of a song of praise.” —Nick Flynn
Book notes: Hardcover, poetry, 144 pages.
Author bio: Rachel Eliza Griffiths is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Lighting the Shadow. Her literary and visual work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Guernica, and many other publications. She lives in New York City.
