FLOATING BONES
​Rae Diamond

“Rae Diamond's collection shows how reality, even belonging, is ‘poised for adaptation.’ With exquisite form that turns language into sleight of hand, this genre-defying work shook all the language in my body until I was a collection of bones rattling in a jar and reminded me that home is nowhere and everywhere.” 

—Corinne Manning, author of We Had No Rules
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“floating bones is a migratory almanac, a drifting and lyrical meditation on home and belonging. Built with poems of ineffable sonic awareness and tender, hand-drawn sketches, floating bones follows a narrator who has left one home for another, just to find that the new home is unlivable. Reckoning with this new liminality, they discover ecstatic communion with the burgeoning natural world around them. This 
everywhere is gulls, foxes and owls; curmudgeonly herons at the shore and seals in the water—all of this life constantly slipping into each other, seeming to skip from realm to realm. The poems in floating bones are a spiritual dance with a nature constantly rebecoming something else, giving certainty to uncertainty. Diamond’s awareness of our temporality, our ‘tempo/rarily animate fragment(s)’ of existence, turn this book into a revelation. floating bones is the sacred book by your bedside that you turn to before you sleep. In a time of housing crisis, environmental displacement and global uncertainty, Rae Diamond is a profound guide through the unknown future.”

—Ever Jones, author of the transliberatory lyric nightsong 

“floating bones is a work of exquisitely crafted poems that excavate and question the meaning of home with honesty and vulnerability. As the reader enters the book with its foreword in poetic form, they learn ‘when at last I found / a home it felt less / like home than everywhere…’ Skillfully constructed poems abound with images that reference nature and mortality and musical language that compels: ‘still outside in/twilight hush in/spiritshattter in/windstir in/awe a drifting/pool reflecting/the world back/to itself’. This book does, in fact, include a skeleton full of gorgeous and mysterious illustrations of found animal bones, deer hooves and antlers, and human teeth with wings. Diamond, an interdisciplinary artist, brings their practice in the visual arts, music, and performance to the work which creates a mesmeric experience for the reader. This startling debut by Rae Diamond offers the reader a portal to a formally inventive and revelatory poetic space in which to reside.”         

—Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House

“There’s an ethereal quality to Rae Diamond’s poetry that guides a reader somewhere that is both familiar and forgotten. In our hasty realm of societal promises and comforts, floating bones offers an invitation to drift awhile in order to experience the dynamism and magnitude of the natural world that lives beyond our familiar walls.”

—Jen Knox, author of We Arrive Uninvited 

“Here Rae (the healer behind the text of the wonderful Cantigee Oracle) frames space where paradox softens, outsung by a note that gathers all sounds into itself and rings out repair. She persuades us that this sound, this felt space, is the availability of a home, a site charged for her by her experiences without one. ‘Homeless’ and ‘unhoused’—the first offers a binary, the second points to process, to potential, to risk of loss and risk of gain. The words do not struggle to replace the other in her diction; she works throughout with sous rature and grayed-out print. These and other names, notions, goads clash and chime, abide as in acoustic space . . . All bones are ear bones? Bone-deep, listen to Rae Diamond.”

—Erik Ehn, American Playwright


90 pages | A5  5.83 x 8.27 in. | 2023
ISBN-13: 978-1-958600-06-1 (paperback)
$18

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Rae Diamond is a neurodivergent interdisciplinary artist, educator, and nature advocate. They wrote, collaged, and published zines as a homeless youth in the ’90s, and their poems now appear or are forthcoming in Petrichor, BlazeVOX, Clockhouse, Miracle Monocle, and Sinister Wisdom. Rae is the author of the prose book, The Cantigee Oracle (North Atlantic Books), the founder of the Long Tone Choir, and a lifelong student and teacher of Qigong. Find her online at raediamond.com and @rae13diamond

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