Pugh, Christina: The Right Hand

Description

Tupelo Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 1, 2024

Publisher Marketing: In poetry that dazzles with its erudition and cosmopolitan approach, Christina Pugh shows us the role of language in constructing-and eventually deconstructing-the self. “In a room made of windows, glass is the skin,” she tells us. At turns luminous and devastating, the work in this gorgeous volume reveals every facet of the narrator’s lived experience-from inhabiting the physical body to articulating a sophisticated artistic sensibility-as discursive constructs, arising out of a nexus of community and shared experience. “[L]ike a flock we all landed at Teresa and the angel,” she recounts. Yet, at the same time, Pugh interrogates the narrator’s lingering sense of cultural and linguistic otherness, revealing connection with those around her as both contingent and inherently unstable. The voice that emerges from this intersection of philosophy and art, celebration and elegy, is as singular as it is eloquent. “I’m thinking everyone must have a fulcrum,” she writes, “The place from which we radiate.” These are poems that radiate with incredible artistic vision and writerly craft.