Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh - by Abigail Ardelle Zammit (Paperback)

About the Book

"This collection offers a subversive take on poetic language, destabilizing the boundaries between genres, and shoving the confessional self off-centre"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

It has been said that the new frontier in poetry isn't discovering ways to experiment, nor is it finding strategies for preserving and honoring tradition. Instead, the most exciting work is actually bridging the gap between tradition and innovation. In other words, cultivating dialogue between postmodern techniques and inherited literary forms. This is one of the myriad ways that Abigail Ardelle Zammit's writerly craft excels. With incredible nuance and erudition, Zammit offers a feminist approach to meter that dazzles with its music, as well as its provocative intervention into the current discourse surrounding prosody. Zammit is a lavishly gifted writer, and this book is a formidable achievement. --Kristina Marie Darling, Fulbright Scholar and author of Daylight Has Already Come: Selected Poems

About the Author

Abigail Ardelle Zammit is a Maltese writer and the author of two poetry collections, Voices from the Land of Trees (Middlesbrough: Smokestack, 2007) and Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (London: Sentinel, 2015), which won second prize in the SPM Poetry Competition. Her poetry and reviews have been published in a variety of international journals including Matter, Tupelo Quarterly, Boulevard, Gutter, Modern Poetry in Translation, Myslexia, Poetry International, The SHOp, Iota, Aesthetica, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and The Ekphrastic Review. She has co-authored two Maltese-English poetry pamphlets and written a Seamus Heaney guidebook for post-secondary students. Her most recent manuscripts have been shortlisted for the Cinnamon Press Literature Award 2022, the Tupelo Press Open Reading Period 2022, the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Prize and the 2023 Snowbound Chapbook Award. Abigail's passion for on-site research has allowed her to take part in artistic residencies around four continents. Her third poetry collection, Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh is forthcoming with Etruscan Press (Wilkes University, 2025).