An Arrangement of Skin

"These are intimate, delicate essays about the many skins we inhabit, illuminating even in their darkness." —The Boston Globe

Anna Journey revels in the flexibility and hybridity of the essay form, swerving artfully among topics—a recollection of a personal rupture and ensuing call to a suicide hotline opens into a consideration of taxidermy and lyric time; a mother’s penchant for telling macabre stories at the dinner table connects to campfire songs and the cultural importance of American roots music; and a tattoo artist named after a pirate–themed rum reminds us how we inscribe our skins and spirits through the intimate gestures of ink.Praise for An Arrangement of Skin

"While reading Anna Journey's An Arrangement of Skin, I kept feeling as though I was riding on a boat, being toured through some beautiful places and some dark places, the person at the oars capably pushing ahead all the while with grace, curiosity, and persistence." —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

"Zoos of antiquity, modern–day tattooed pirates, and ghost stories are all drawn together with Journey’s poetic talent... This is a retrospective that does not alienate with its personal tone. Rather, the reader is invited to reflect on a life’s many transitions and how they become part of the self." —Booklist, starred review

"Reading the essays in Anna Journey’s elegant, haunting new collection, An Arrangement of Skin, is like cracking open a closet door and peering in to see a tight and private collection of oddities, secrets, and skeletons . . . These are intimate, delicate essays about the many skins we inhabit, illuminating even in their darkness." —The Boston Globe

"Journey is a stunning writer . . . This brilliant collection shows us how the object, and the artistic interpretation laid across this object allows it, and the dangling strands of story and narrative that make it up, to stretch across time, generations, and family; to become something bigger—a single sliver of the greater public consciousness." —The East Bay Review

"'Done with the compass, done with the chart!' cried Emily Dickinson, tossing aside familiar ways of navigating the body's wild seas. Anna Journey's adventurous book traces what it is to be flesh in a surprising suite of essays that turns—like Ovid's poems, or Plath's—around images of dismemberment and metamorphosis. She might be our first Southern Gothic essayist, and she invigorates the form with both a poet's lyricism and the distinctive signature of her character: a vulnerable heart wedded to an acute, comic, unsparing eye." —Mark Doty

"An Arrangement of Skin embodies what thrills me most in the essay form—an artist trying, over and over, to find the different paths into the subterranean realms of her subconscious. An early and unlikely image—taxidermy—contains the essence of the various tensions that connect these thoughts. For Journey, taxidermy 'evokes that ineffable spark of life: call it a soul, a personality, a sentience'. An Arrangement of Skin is by turns transformative and vital, and with it Journey takes her place alongside Biss, Jamison, and D'Ambrosio." —Nick FlynnAnna Journey is the author of the poetry collections The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Vulgar Remedies, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, the latter of which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She's received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, Yaddo, and elsewhere. She's an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California.