Whose Flesh is Flame, Whose Bone is Time

From the coal country of Western Pennsylvania, to Camorra-ridden Naples, to the streets of Damascus before the outbreak of civil war, these lyric poems chart the complexities of national and intimate identity. By turns playful, lamenting, skeptical, bawdy, and aggrieved, they find the human fingerprint below history's erasures, ultimately praising the endurance of the soul "so ample that, if that is all there is, / she makes a feast of thorns." V. Penelope Pelizzon was born in 1967 in Massachusetts. A diplomat's spouse, she navigates between postings abroad and her current position as Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.