| book details |

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod

By (author) Kathryn Smith

| on special |

normal price: R 410.95

Price: R 369.95

| add to trolley |

| book description |

A 2022 Washington State Book Award finalist Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. A father who works in a timber mill. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves. Loss, never-ending loss.Â Self-Portrait with Cephalopodâ€”selected by francine j. harris as winner of the Jake Adam York Prizeâ€”is an account of being a girl, and then a woman, in the world; of being a living creature on a doomed planet; of being someone who aspires to do better but is torn between attention and distraction. Here, Kathryn Smith offers observations and anxieties, prophecies and prayers, darkness and lightâ€”but never false hope. Instead, she incises our vanities and our hypocrisies, â€œthe bloody hand holding back / the skin,â€ revealing â€œthe worldâ€™s inner workings, / rubbery and caught between the teeth.â€ These are the poems of someone who feels her and our failings in the viscera, in the bones, and who bears witness to that pain on the page. Self-Portrait with CephalopodÂ is an urgent and necessary collection about living in this precarious moment, meditative and resolutely unsentimental.