No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace by Jean D’Amérique and translated by Conor Bracken

This is poetry from Haiti.

No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace by Jean D’Amérique translated by Conor Bracken is published by Ugly Duckling Presse. This is a Book originally written in French. This was published in 2022.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781946433947E12.

No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace, by Jean D’Amérique and translated from French by Conor Bracken, is the kind of book that asks for a slower reader. Its center of gravity seems to be skin, blood, tenderness, and political wreckage, but the point is not to make those themes behave too neatly. Poetry is often most alive when it lets a reader feel a relation before naming it. I would place this book in front of someone willing to follow image, cadence, and mood before demanding a thesis. The translation carries a voice shaped by poetry connected to Haiti into English while keeping enough strangeness intact for the encounter to matter. No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace belongs here because it enlarges the shelf’s emotional and linguistic weather.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.