TOUGH SKIN by Sarah Eaton

TOUGH SKIN is an invention of glittering grotesqueries. Part librarian, part Georges Bataille, part crazy old lady, these poems-stories-whatever-they-are will haunt you like a drunken uncle waiting for you in the bushes. They will stick to your brain like shadow. Dark, disgusting, gorgeous, hilarious: There is nothing like this book. Sarah Eaton is from the future.

—Kathryn Regina, author of I Am in the Air Right Now

Sarah Eaton has created an utterly original world in which the sacred and the profane, the hideous and the beautiful, the lover and the monster, are indistinguishable counterparts.  Even the most depraved inhabitants of TOUGH SKIN are not only charming and erudite, but ultimately endearing creatures, capable of transformation, redemption, and profound, unorthodox love.

—Megan Martin, author of Sparrow and Other Eulogies

Tough Skin, Sarah Eaton’s rewriting of the history of the future as well as the erasure of the future’s past, made me swoon. The tender unbuttoning of language induced in me a full-blown vaso-vagal syncope, not simply from the vivid disrupted tissue deconstruction rendered here in spades but from the hyped-up hypnotic gross anatomy of grammar, syntax, and sass that makes my 10th cranial nerve twitch, fidget, and yak. This prose poses a visceral threat, the poetics flail. Who knew there were so many layers of skin to skin? Sarah Eaton rings this bell, pulls this trigger.  Like that, she floors me.

—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone  

Sarah Eaton’s TOUGH SKIN is a dark trip into the “wiggly and nonsensical,” a wry and hallucinatory catalogue of body parts, disease, and family. This book is a controlled substance. Like the narrator, the reader is left wondering: is the attic jam-packed with insulation or squirrels?

—Meghan Austin, author of love block

A mash of elevated, classic sentence structure and roiling, discomfiting scenarios/vocab. These lines kick and punch against their form.  What a fight!  But within, you will find many attractive and apt aphorisms.

—Stacey Levine, author of The Girl with Brown Fur

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Sarah Eaton's writing has appeared in various places around the internet, such as McSweeney's and elimae.  She has a blog called The Grown-up.  She works at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402619