Edging

Poetry. Formally innovative and playful, drawing on personal experience and research, Michelle Noteboom's first collection of poems weaves together obsessions with skin and body, desire and violence, science and sensuality. While remaining firmly rooted in a real sense of physicality, EDGING catapults us into a futuristic outpost "on the outskirts of something," where identity blurs and our bodies become "a new kind of language." "We're all insiders when it comes to the skin. Michelle Noteboom's EDGING wants to turn that inside out. This is skin as the material of ever-changing identity. The vibrations, pressure points, scrubbing and shedding--various, curious, tragic, sensual, and exact. William Burroughs thought language was a virus; reading Noteboom one suspects it may be a masseuse.."--Rod Smith. "In this deeply moving first collection, Michelle Noteboom takes a rigorous, relentless, and compassionate look at the body in its most vulnerable moments. Focusing on skin--as a wave in which the body breaks against the world, as a screen on which our most intimate communications are written--she probes human possibility, revealing how it can betray humanity, but also, how, ultimately, it returns to it"--Cole Swensen.