Ariana Nadia Nash

Ariana Nadia Nash, winner of the 2011 Levine Prize in Poetry for Instructions for Preparing Your Skin, is also the author of the chapbook Our Blood Is Singing. She has received a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She completed her MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and over the last ten years has worked fifteen jobs, including three years teaching creative writing at UNC Wilmington. She has lived in California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Hawaii, and currently resides in Illinois. She looks forward to returning home to San Francisco and continuing to teach.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PREPARING YOUR SKIN
BY ARIANA NADIA NASH
$18.00. (email us for availability)

Winner of the 2011 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. "Ariana Nadia Nash's INSTRUCTIONS FOR PREPARING YOUR SKIN is an exquisitely passionate first book. Mostly I am struck by the lyrical frankness of the poems, and how they sustain an uncanny purity and yet are totally down to earth."—Malena Mörling

Instructions for Preparing Your Skin is a startling book in which so much is at stake. Love poems morph into hate poems into indifference poems then back again into deeper love poems. Nash's stark raw material is transformed into verse as honest and clear as the mirrors in which we recognize ourselves. There is no way to prepare for these striking poems that strike against any temporary assuredness we may have about our bodies and each other.Instructions for Preparing Your Skin is candid, revelatory, and uncompromising in its vision. -- Denise Duhamel, judge, 2011 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry