The Stories Our Skin Tells

Jane Dawson's poetry is shaped by the observations, musings and perplexities of everyday life. The title of this collection, The Stories Our Skin Tells, signals that these poems are concerned with the experience of time, aging, language, choice and the lifelong quest for meaning. The poems evoke a sense of the changing body as our place of encounter with the world. The poems ask: How do the young see the old, how do the old see the young, how do we makes sense of the losses, decisions and astonishing surprises that the passage of time can bring? Many, possibly all, the poems in this collection touch on the elusiveness of fixity, how time keeps us in a constant state of flux, whether we acknowledge it or not. In these poems, the particular becomes universal, inviting deeper reflection on the beauty and mystery that surrounds us in every moment.