Skin Can Hold

Vahni Capildeo, author of Measures of Expatriation (Forward Prize, 2016), returns with her third Carcanet collection, Skin Can Hold. The collection marks an experimental departure for a traditionally pen-and-paper poet as she explores embodied practice—theatre, dance, and experimental performance. These texts are the fruit of those experiments and collaborations, drawing on her sporadic training in the techniques of burlesque and mime and, going further back, on her childhood fascination with Caribbean masquerade and French theatre. The poems take various forms, from soliloquy to prose. They are astir with voices and bodies usually kept ‘between the lines’ of poetry: someone weeping outside the decorum of a lyric; polyglot workmen along an ivory-tower-city road. Commemorating the First World War, a rondeau threads the language of flowers with the language of the ‘field postcard’, in which national security required soldiers to communicate by crossing out options and adding nothing else.