Leaves Borrowed From Human Flesh by Abigail Ardelle Zammit
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In Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh, the solipsistic self gives way to a language which attempts to recover the female body’s experience of place, and of the human and non-human creatures which inhabit it. The ethical dilemmas of representation are framed by a consciousness which allows itself to be permeated by whatever lies outside it, impinging on its boundaries to make them fluid, plural, at times, evanescent.
Divided into four sections which highlight an unmistakable female consciousness engaging with vast natural landscapes in four different continents, the collection’s evolution is towards a subtle form of resistance where anthropocentric certainties are interrogated. What starts as left-margined free verse, often using ekphrasis to highlight gender violence and resistance, leans increasingly towards the playful and experimental, at times adopting metre and traditional forms in combination with found poetry and erasure so as to destabilize the boundaries between genres. By the end of the collection, the page is no longer a mechanism for order and structure, but instead, evolves into a canvas and visual field, challenging the social order through language itself.
In Abigail Ardelle Zammit’s third collection, suffering, mortality and environmental degradation are inseparable from the poet’s relentless search for meaning. Relationships, aloneness and connectedness must be probed as inexhaustible themes in the vast trajectory of existence. Each poem is a question, an exploration of what can be unearthed through linguistic play, as well as an attempt to decolonize the self from a language that is always on the verge of running dry.
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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 (2025).
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