Posted on by Abigail Ardelle Zammit, Poet

Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh (Etruscan Press, Wilkes University, 2025)

‘If you don’t yet know Abigail Zammit’s work, prepare yourself for the
extraordinary. Her work is sensually evocative, highly energized and
formally adventurous. The poems in Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh
are spatial and temporal adventures, from disciplined stanzas to free-form
poems that explode into parallel texts and languages. They are inhabited
by the actual and the mythical, by individual experience and collective
memory. Some poems take on an evanescent counter presence, others repurpose
existing texts and redact them into a filigree of language within the
dissolution of a black page. There is a powerful sense of human experience
trying to be itself in the moment of sensory gestation whilst simultaneously
haunted by history and the presence of other voices. This is a rich and
dynamic collection, impossible to adequately sum up (or put down). Each
poem re-defines the act of reading and the realization of multiple meanings.’
—Graham Mort, Black Shiver Moss