Skin Can Hold
2019
First Published
3.61
Average Rating
128
Number of Pages
Longlisted for the 2020 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. Vahni Capildeo, author of Measures of Expatriation (Forward Prize, 2016), returns with a third Carcanet volume, Skin Can Hold . The collection marks an adventurous departure for a pen-and-paper poet. These texts are the fruit of collaborative experiments in theatre, dance and other performance, drawing on burlesque and mime as well as Capildeo’s fascination with Caribbean masquerade. The poems are astir with voices and bodies usually kept ‘between the lines’ of a weeping poltergeist disrupting the decorum of a lyric; polyglot workmen along an ivory-towercity road. Novels are turned inside out to become dramas of sleaze and surveillance.
Avg Rating
3.61
Number of Ratings
18
5 STARS
6%
4 STARS
50%
3 STARS
44%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
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Author
Vahni Capildeo
Author · 7 books
Vahni Capildeo is a Trinidadian Scottish writer inspired by other voices, ranging from live Caribbean connexions and an Indian diaspora background to the landscapes where Capildeo travels and lives. Their poetry (seven books and four pamphlets) includes Measures of Expatriation, awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2016. Following a DPhil in Old Norse literature, Capildeo has worked in academia; in culture for development, with Commonwealth Writers; and as an Oxford English Dictionary lexicographer. Capildeo held the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship and Harper-Wood Studentship at Cambridge, and more recently a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellowship at the University of Leeds.
