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Flare by Camisha L. Jones

$14.99

 

Camisha Jones‘ Flare is a light splashed across the sky announcing a voice we all need to follow. The poems in this collection offer us the body as a home for joy, desire, pain, but most importantly, the human. Jones’ poems are human poems, bloody and bloody honest in how she cements a poetics of ability and invisible illness, but from that invisible place rises a voice that is very visible, muscular, and definitely here to stay.

–Danez Smith, author of [insert] boy and founding member of The Dark Noise Collective

 

Jones startlingly beautiful poems have a visceral presence. They remind the reader that the body and mind are not static. While she writes of her own experience, her poems are able to reach into the wider collective. She is honest about the complexity of disability without denying the presence of the “magnificent in its invisible injury.”All beings are “heading straight towards the thing/that will finish us.” It is in this space, this commonality, where empathy resides.

–-Jennifer Bartlett, co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and author of Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography

 

Camisha Jones’ poems, like the body itself, are pleasure, then fire, then hunger. They are dispatches from the intersection of hurting and joy, where disability resides. We are fragile beings, the poet tell us. Yes, we are. But read this stunning first collection and you too will burn and flare – in recognition and in praise.

–Sarah Browning, Executive Director of Split This Rock and author of Killing Summer

 

 

Flare

by Camisha L. Jones

$14.99, paper

978-1-63534-281-9

2017

Flare explores the wonder, resilience, and betrayal of the body. Born from the author’s experience with recurrent and escalating hearing loss and chronic pain, this poetry collection unapologetically breaks silence around invisible disability and shows us, even in struggle, there is light to be let in. While delving into topics such as loss, hope, anxiety, and faith, Flare grapples with what it truly means to be capable and to make peace with one’s limitations in a society that equates disability with brokenness.

Camisha L. Jones believes in breaking silences, opposing oppression, and building community through poetry. Her writing is heavily influenced by her experiences with hearing loss and chronic pain, as well as her background leading anti-bias programs, community service initiatives, and arts ministry. Camisha represented Virginia at the 2013 National Poetry Slam with Slam Richmond. Her poems can be found in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Deaf Poetry Society, Typo, Rogue Agent, pluck!, Unfolding the Soul of Black Deaf Expressions, and The Quarry, Split This Rock’s social justice poetry database. In 2017, she was awarded a Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship from The Loft Literary Center. She is Managing Director at Split This Rock, a national non-profit that cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change.

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