Seeing the Body by Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a radiant collection of poetry and photographs that reckons with her mother’s death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The collection is an elegiac and moving meditation on the ways in which we witness “bodies” of grief and healing. Award-winning NPR journalist Jacki Lyden, who also wrote the acclaimed memoir Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, joined Griffiths in conversation.
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Seeing the Body
By Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Published by WW Norton
Poems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss.
In radiant poems―set against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events, pop culture, and politics―Rachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mother’s death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The collision of text and imagery offers an associative autobiography, in which narratives of language, absence, and presence are at once saved, revised, and often erased. Seeing the Body dismantles personal and public masks of silence and self-destruction to visualize and celebrate the imperfect freedom of radical self-love.
