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An Arrangement of Skin: Essays
Anna Journey’s lyrical and layered arrangement of essays dazzles us with her reflections on our shifting selves—the many “skins” we inhabit in a life. An Arrangement of Skin is by turns beguiling, dark, carnal, and deeply personal. Journey revels in the flexibility and hybridity of the essay form, enriching her idiosyncratic anecdotes with literary and cultural meditations and electrifying the work with a poet’s keen ear and canny eye.
These essays swerve artfully among topics—a recollection of a personal rupture and ensuing call to a suicide hotline opens into a consideration of taxidermy and lyric time; a mother’s penchant for telling macabre stories at the dinner table connects to campfire songs and the cultural importance of American roots music; and a tattoo artist named after a pirate-themed rum reminds us how we inscribe our skins and spirits through the intimate gestures of ink. This is a first collection from an essayist of the highest order.
These essays swerve artfully among topics—a recollection of a personal rupture and ensuing call to a suicide hotline opens into a consideration of taxidermy and lyric time; a mother’s penchant for telling macabre stories at the dinner table connects to campfire songs and the cultural importance of American roots music; and a tattoo artist named after a pirate-themed rum reminds us how we inscribe our skins and spirits through the intimate gestures of ink. This is a first collection from an essayist of the highest order.
225 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 21, 2017
5 people are currently reading
370 people want to read
About the author
Anna Journey
11 books14 followersAnna Journey is an American poet and essayist who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 21, 2017
I'm a great fan of essay collections (short stories not so much), so after the first entry here I had high hopes for the book. Sadly, having just finished it, my verdict would be: disappointing.
The contents are well-written, but more of a memoir in essay form. Unfortunately, for that to work I need to find the author interesting, if not likeable. Here, I did not; others may, and that's great, but anyone who felt they couldn't get into this one, or came away at all frustrated: you are not alone.
The contents are well-written, but more of a memoir in essay form. Unfortunately, for that to work I need to find the author interesting, if not likeable. Here, I did not; others may, and that's great, but anyone who felt they couldn't get into this one, or came away at all frustrated: you are not alone.
November 5, 2017
Evoking strong emotions from the get-go, Journey opens the essay collection with her own call to a suicide hotline, followed by various stories relating to an infidelity that cost her several relationships. Brutal and raw, but also with moments of humor,
An Arrangement of Skin
is a work of art from the poet/essayist Anna Journey.
Highlights of the collection:
Birds 101 - Journey's taxidermy of a starling class
The Goliath Jazz - when a childhood acquaintance commits murder, she looks back for clues into his past... in a children's church musical of David and Goliath.
The Guineveres - her mother's story of folk music, and growing up
Modifying the Badger - Taxidermy pt 2, this time with small mammals
Bluebeard's Closet - Bluebeard legend and all sorts of other disparate tidbits that worked so well together.
I am looking forward to her poetry. This collection was stellar.
Highlights of the collection:
Birds 101 - Journey's taxidermy of a starling class
The Goliath Jazz - when a childhood acquaintance commits murder, she looks back for clues into his past... in a children's church musical of David and Goliath.
The Guineveres - her mother's story of folk music, and growing up
Modifying the Badger - Taxidermy pt 2, this time with small mammals
Bluebeard's Closet - Bluebeard legend and all sorts of other disparate tidbits that worked so well together.
I am looking forward to her poetry. This collection was stellar.
October 10, 2020
I v. much wanted to love this collection given my obsession with lyric essays and personal connection to Richmond. However, Journey's essays often felt half-formed and self-indulgent. The pieces had plenty of opportunity to speak to and across each other, but the collection read as if the essays weren't meant to be consumed in succession (how many times do we need to be reminded of Lee and the affair? Apparently the answer is "more than five."). Several pieces also fell prey to annoying modern essay tics (attempting to personalize a tragedy of someone in the community that you had v. limited connection to, quoting the OED, making shallow connections between autobiography and things that seem "cool" -- here, taxidermy).
May 19, 2017
Belated edit: including my interview with Anna for Electric Literature below:
https://electricliterature.com/from-s...
Journey has a preternatural gift for artful swerving and associative shifting, so that—in the title essay, for example—a recollection of a breakdown and an ensuing call to a suicide hotline opens into a consideration of taxidermy and lyric time. In writing about her mother’s penchant for telling macabre stories at the dinner table, Journey makes a connection to campfire songs, and suddenly we’re delivered into a new space the essay has created to argue for the cultural importance of American roots music. And in providing the reader with a portrait of a tattoo artist named after a pirate-themed rum, Journey is concurrently turning our attention to the ways in which we inscribe our skins and spirits through the intimate gestures of ink. All of this without the work ever feeling as though Journey has her thumb on the scale, which is no small feat. This restraint is a mark of brilliance as well as an act of generosity. It’s a vote for the reader’s autonomy and an invitation to wonder and wander inside the latitudes laid out in the work; spaces in which Journey is both our cartographer and our fellow traveler.
https://electricliterature.com/from-s...
Journey has a preternatural gift for artful swerving and associative shifting, so that—in the title essay, for example—a recollection of a breakdown and an ensuing call to a suicide hotline opens into a consideration of taxidermy and lyric time. In writing about her mother’s penchant for telling macabre stories at the dinner table, Journey makes a connection to campfire songs, and suddenly we’re delivered into a new space the essay has created to argue for the cultural importance of American roots music. And in providing the reader with a portrait of a tattoo artist named after a pirate-themed rum, Journey is concurrently turning our attention to the ways in which we inscribe our skins and spirits through the intimate gestures of ink. All of this without the work ever feeling as though Journey has her thumb on the scale, which is no small feat. This restraint is a mark of brilliance as well as an act of generosity. It’s a vote for the reader’s autonomy and an invitation to wonder and wander inside the latitudes laid out in the work; spaces in which Journey is both our cartographer and our fellow traveler.
June 26, 2017
The fact that An Arrangement of Skin has cover blurbs from Mark Doty and Maggie Nelson, both of whom I really like, probably helped convince me to check this book out from the library, even though I wasn't actually sure I was in the mood for a book of essays. As it turns out, I was (eventually) in the mood for a book of essays, and this was an excellent choice. The fourteen essays here are largely personal in nature, with Journey recounting bits of her life and her family history, but they also pull in literature and history; there are passages talking about (and quoting) poems by Larry Levis or Thomas James or C.D. Wright, or referencing Walter Benjamin or Gaston Bachelard. (Journey herself is a poet and academic.)
Journey refers, in the first essay, to a point in her life when she "invented a ritual to stop time," and then talks about poetry as serving the same purpose (pp 4-5). She talks about taxidermy (which she take a few classes in) as another way to do this, and also about it being a characteristic of certain places, as when she says this about Richmond, Virginia: "As soon as someone enters an alley, the wisteria-shrouded path stops time" (121). This concern with the passage of time/memory reminds me a bit of André Aciman, as does the way Journey looks at her past self and the spaces she inhabited or moved through, whether she's talking about the horseback-riding lessons she took when her family lived in India when she was six and seven years old, or those alleyways and wisteria and porches of Richmond (where she went to college and also lived after the end of a long-term relationship).
I like the style of these essays a lot: in a few of them, like "Epithalamium with Skunk Pigs," I really like how Journey seems to proceed via a chain of association and memory, in this way where you don't quite know where she's going until she gets there, though when you arrive you get the sense that it was actually all carefully mapped out. I also really love the descriptions of places in some of the pieces, especially a paragraph about the now-empty zoo in Los Angeles's Griffith Park that appears in "A Flicker of Animal, a Flank": it's so great I wish I could quote it in full here, but it's a bit long for that. Ah well: if you read this book, you'll have it to look forward to. Meanwhile, the book's very satisfying final essay, "Bluebeard's Closet," is available in its entirety on the Blackbird website: this was a really solid end to the book, but I think would serve just as well as an introduction to it.
Journey refers, in the first essay, to a point in her life when she "invented a ritual to stop time," and then talks about poetry as serving the same purpose (pp 4-5). She talks about taxidermy (which she take a few classes in) as another way to do this, and also about it being a characteristic of certain places, as when she says this about Richmond, Virginia: "As soon as someone enters an alley, the wisteria-shrouded path stops time" (121). This concern with the passage of time/memory reminds me a bit of André Aciman, as does the way Journey looks at her past self and the spaces she inhabited or moved through, whether she's talking about the horseback-riding lessons she took when her family lived in India when she was six and seven years old, or those alleyways and wisteria and porches of Richmond (where she went to college and also lived after the end of a long-term relationship).
I like the style of these essays a lot: in a few of them, like "Epithalamium with Skunk Pigs," I really like how Journey seems to proceed via a chain of association and memory, in this way where you don't quite know where she's going until she gets there, though when you arrive you get the sense that it was actually all carefully mapped out. I also really love the descriptions of places in some of the pieces, especially a paragraph about the now-empty zoo in Los Angeles's Griffith Park that appears in "A Flicker of Animal, a Flank": it's so great I wish I could quote it in full here, but it's a bit long for that. Ah well: if you read this book, you'll have it to look forward to. Meanwhile, the book's very satisfying final essay, "Bluebeard's Closet," is available in its entirety on the Blackbird website: this was a really solid end to the book, but I think would serve just as well as an introduction to it.
May 7, 2019
I really adore and respect Anna Journey’s poetry, and had high hopes for this collection of autobiographical essays. Unfortunately, it did not work for me at all. Mostly, it just felt very disjointed and messy whilst also heavily curated, a combination that jarred. I’m not sure if individually, some of the contributions were first published elsewhere, but if not, there was a lot of repetition and informing the reader of the same facts and background information that had appeared in the last essay (and often the one before that, too) - at the very least, some editing would have solved that problem and improved the flow. Also, and I recognise that this is an awful thing to say of someone’s personal essays, but a number of the inclusions felt unnecessary and over-indulgent. I am actually a fan of autobiographical reflections written by authors/poets that I admire, and enjoy how they consider their experiences in wider contexts and how it has informed their views and stance on the world. I didn’t get that sense here. It was more a catharsis and justification of decisions she had made in her life, which, as readers, we should neither need or be entitled to, so who was the book intended for? Whilst there were glimpses of wider thoughts, I couldn’t help thinking that they were vehicles for the stories, rather than the other way around.
I will continue to read any poetry that Anna Journey releases; I resonate with her style and feel that as a conduit for her past and emotions, poems are the ideal medium. I just didn’t get that same sense here.
I will continue to read any poetry that Anna Journey releases; I resonate with her style and feel that as a conduit for her past and emotions, poems are the ideal medium. I just didn’t get that same sense here.
February 16, 2018
It's quite readable. if essay collections were more like this, I would probably read more of them, but too many seem stuffy or needlessly heavy. Journey has a habit of quoting others instead of trusting her own voice. She jumps around a lot, and frequently touches on several different topics in one essay. She's an imperfect person, so if you're expecting a saint, you'll be disappointed.
"An Arrangement of Skin" - An affair, a call to a suicide hotline, a Parisian taxidermy shop / museum.
"Birds 101" - Taxidermy, animal fables. I thought this was one of the weaker ones.
"The Goliath Jazz" - A boy from her church murdered his sister.
"Epithalamium with Skunk Pigs" - Her husband, Natalie Wood, Morgan le Fay, Avalon.
"The Guineveres" - Her mother, folk music.
"Strange Merchants" - 7th grade, her father's odd encounter at the La Paz airport. I thought this was one of the stronger ones.
"Little Face" - Aging, a famous cosmetic surgeon, chicken pox scars. I thought this was one of the weaker ones.
"A Flicker of Animal, a Flank" - An abandoned zoo, a tattoo artist, Alberto Vargas.
"Pangaea for Alice" - Richmond, wisteria, a friend / poetry mentor.
"A Common Skin" - Living in India as a youth, horse riding.
"Prologue as Part of the Body" - Hollywood Cemetery (Richmond), tattoos, Walter Benjamin.
"Retro Anatomy of a String Bass" - Her ex, who played the instrument. I thought this was one of the stronger ones.
"Modifying the Badger" - Taxidermy. I thought this was one of the weaker ones.
"Bluebeard's Closet" - Henri Andru, Hans Christian Andersen, the Museum of Death, the legend of Bluebeard.
And taxidermy is about life, not death.
- "An Arrangement of Skin"
But I know what it's like to stand an inch from the bathroom mirror and scrutinize every mark and scar.
- "Little Face"
On her closeted psychiatrist grandfather:
How could he advise his patients to accept themselves when he couldn't show that same generosity toward himself?
- "Bluebeard's Closet"
I'm certain that if I'd had a different sort of mother - one who wasn't fascinated by macabre stories and death-haunted songs - I wouldn't have grown up to become a writer.
- "The Guineveres"
"An Arrangement of Skin" - An affair, a call to a suicide hotline, a Parisian taxidermy shop / museum.
"Birds 101" - Taxidermy, animal fables. I thought this was one of the weaker ones.
"The Goliath Jazz" - A boy from her church murdered his sister.
"Epithalamium with Skunk Pigs" - Her husband, Natalie Wood, Morgan le Fay, Avalon.
"The Guineveres" - Her mother, folk music.
"Strange Merchants" - 7th grade, her father's odd encounter at the La Paz airport. I thought this was one of the stronger ones.
"Little Face" - Aging, a famous cosmetic surgeon, chicken pox scars. I thought this was one of the weaker ones.
"A Flicker of Animal, a Flank" - An abandoned zoo, a tattoo artist, Alberto Vargas.
"Pangaea for Alice" - Richmond, wisteria, a friend / poetry mentor.
"A Common Skin" - Living in India as a youth, horse riding.
"Prologue as Part of the Body" - Hollywood Cemetery (Richmond), tattoos, Walter Benjamin.
"Retro Anatomy of a String Bass" - Her ex, who played the instrument. I thought this was one of the stronger ones.
"Modifying the Badger" - Taxidermy. I thought this was one of the weaker ones.
"Bluebeard's Closet" - Henri Andru, Hans Christian Andersen, the Museum of Death, the legend of Bluebeard.
And taxidermy is about life, not death.
- "An Arrangement of Skin"
But I know what it's like to stand an inch from the bathroom mirror and scrutinize every mark and scar.
- "Little Face"
On her closeted psychiatrist grandfather:
How could he advise his patients to accept themselves when he couldn't show that same generosity toward himself?
- "Bluebeard's Closet"
I'm certain that if I'd had a different sort of mother - one who wasn't fascinated by macabre stories and death-haunted songs - I wouldn't have grown up to become a writer.
- "The Guineveres"
December 2, 2017
Lyric essays are a newer genre, and this collection is a thoughtful, erudite compilation of poet Anna Journey’s writing. Extremely well-done and well written, reading these essays demands a thoughtful, well-read and multi-educated reader. I found the essays provoked my curiosity, my thinking about language and it’s uses, and about the ways our thoughts follow hyperlinks from idea to idea.
Take the time to read and ruminate over this work.
Take the time to read and ruminate over this work.
April 8, 2020
Individually, the essays are generally well-written, but as a collection this doesn't work. The essays are exceptionally repetitive, telling and retelling, sometimes in virtually the same words, the story of a break-up with a boyfriend and the author's affair. She tells this story in almost all the essays without ever going deeper. When she describes other topics, however, the essays are much more interesting.
March 25, 2020
This one really didn't do it for me. I felt the collections were all over the place, utilizing other author's writing and pulling on the same personal vignettes over and over again and in a way that didn't make the final product feel complete or satisfying for the reader. Where meaning was being pulled out, it felt overdone or not necessarily there to begin with in the first place.
May 8, 2017
Nope.
May 16, 2017
Great book
April 15, 2019
3.5 stars.
February 23, 2021
A wonderful short read. It made me feel and think deeply about how intricate people can be and how fascinating life is, but at the same time it brought me some deeply buried sadness.
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May 9, 2021Anticipate a review soon on my YouTube channel: Coffee, Cats, and King.
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January 8, 2022I learned about taxidermy because she wrote it beautifully.
December 31, 2020
Journey brings southern gothic to the essay genre. This book made me feel sad, and creepy, and fall in love all at the same time
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews