About the book

Catherine Ronan’s debut poetry collection, Elemental Skin, fairly crackles with electricity and verve as each turned page lets loose a gorgeous cacophony, a brimming over of musical plenty. Vivid, exacting portraits haunt this book—of people and places lost; of Ireland herself, her goddesses and green and ghostly shadows. But the poems of Elemental Skin are also poems of revival sung in the voice of a woman joyous with the near-too-muchness of living as she is kissed awake by the world. — Francesca Bell