ABOUT THIS BOOK

Poems that radiate with incredible artistic vision and writerly craft.

Pain, piercing, and language: with urgent lyricism and lacunae on the page, The Right Hand explores the physical, emotional, and philosophical experiences of chronic pain, bodywork (especially acupuncture), and healing. In the second half of the collection, the poet spends extended time with Bernini's sculpture of St. Teresa in Ecstasy in Rome, finding this famous scene of wounding to be in dialogue with her own experience of pain, as well as her suspension between languages and spiritual isolation. In The Right Hand, the hidden sites of the body speak, and Bernini’s centuries-old arrow pierces us with hurting eloquence.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Christina Pugh has published five books of poems including Stardust Media (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and Perception (Four Way Books, 2017), named one of the top poetry books of 2017 by Chicago Review of Books. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and many other publications. Her book of essays on poetry, On Ghosts and the Overplus: Reading Poems in the Twenty-First Century, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in 2024. She has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Bogliasco Foundation. A recent visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, she is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

REVIEWS

"In a shimmering phenomenology of body, spirit, and soul, The Right Hand resides at the tender junction of nerve and bone, “a nexus: metropolitan.” In her radiant collection, Christina Pugh’s astute eye illuminates Maya Lin’s lovely river of pins, St. Teresa of Avila with an angel, and wonders such as a “sea of porphyry.” A mystical cartography of the senses, Pugh’s earthbound threshold of the human resonates with our longing for God and the eternal, mapping a basil leaf juxtaposed to a basilica, displaying “the flash of a neural jewel,” or glowing with “this notion / of change carved in marble / unfettering the seam / between watcher / and creator.”"

— Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Beautiful Immunity

"I had thought the mystery of the body and the mystery of faith were different mysteries, and then I read Christina Pugh’s The Right Hand, and learned I’d been thinking wrong. I want to say that this book is two books stitched together by an intelligence of remarkable sensitivity, but it isn’t true. Rather, the two long poems of which the whole is comprised—"Into the Skin" and "L’Incontro: The Meeting"—act as stereoscope, bringing the body’s pain and the soul’s ecstasy into their overlapping dimensionality which makes them, finally, real. Skin pierced is the primary principle: the poet’s experience with acupuncture to remedy chronic pain, St. Teresa of Avila (as depicted by Bernini and her own words), pierced by the spear of the angel. In lines needle-sharp, Pugh works toward the radical passivity that might be poetry’s highest achievement—that to the pain one is in, some hand unbidden comes, and relieves it. Call that inspiration or call it intervention, call it Muse or call it medicine, the result is the same: the shattered nerve stitches together again into the possibility of beauty, and these are beautiful poems, true to both body and soul."

— Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents

Into the Skin 7
L’Incontro: The Meeting 49