From the coal country of Western Pennsylvania, to Camorra-ridden Naples, to the streets of Damascus before the outbreak of civil war, the lyric poems in V. Penelope Pelizzon’s Whose Flesh is Flame, Whose Bone is Time (a finalist for the eighth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize) chart the complexities of national and intimate identity. By turns playful, lamenting, sceptical, bawdy, and aggrieved, they find the human fingerprint below history’s erasures, ultimately praising the endurance of the soul “so ample that, if that is all there is,/ she makes a feast of thorns.”
V. Penelope Pelizzon was born in 1967 and grew up on a small farm near Boston, Massachusetts. Her first poetry collection, Nostos (2000) won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award.