Happy Book Birthday to Medium by Johanna Skibsrud
Today, we’re celebrating the publication of Medium by Johanna Skibsrud!
Join us in welcoming this formally inventive and deeply imaginative reflection on women’s lives throughout history.
Happy Book Birthday to Medium by Johanna Skibsrud! In this highly anticipated and riveting collection of poems, Skibsrud shares the lives and perspectives of women who—in their roles as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums—have helped to shape the course of history.
Quill & Quire recently included Medium in their Spring 2024 Poetry Preview.
Johanna Skibsrud is the author of multiple books—including the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel, The Sentimentalists. In 2019, we also published her essay collection, The Nothing That Is: Essays on Art, Literature, and Being. We’re thrilled to welcome this new collection to our catalogue!
Skibsrud has shared a video introduction to Medium in anticipation of the book’s release.
Advance Praise for Medium
“The accumulation of voices in Skibsrud’s Medium serves to reclassify individuality, offering a choral refuge and a devotion to a larger field of inquiry. Readers will delight and be haunted by the invocation of the ‘divine feminine.’”
—Annie Guthrie, author of The Good Dark
“Sybil-like, Skibsrud uses each of her subject’s vidas (lives) as springboards for creating the cansos (poems) that make up the wonder that is Medium. Each of these women’s voices becomes audible, their bodies fully fleshed, their emotions and essence masterfully articulated. This collection presents an entirely novel means of actualizing the troubadour paradigm. It’s a gift one can enjoy unwrapping for a long time, each time finding something new. To read these poems is to enter a world of beauty and meaning. What we have here is the work of an extraordinary poet.”
—Beatriz Hausner, author of She Who Lies Above
“Probing the confines of time, the textures of geographies and cultures, and our ability to address one another and really listen, Johanna Skibsrud offers multivocal monologues attuned to phantom voices. These poems speak and speak again, becoming various types of mediums: a means of tracing often silenced, forgotten, or mislaid lives; the very substance, the hard material of evanescent bodies transubstantiated into a kind of permanence; voices communicating between the imagined and the real. Whispering in our eye-ears, they pass no judgment. Instead they offer us their open word hands, so that we might take them.”
—Oana Avasilichioaei, author of Eight Track
____________________________________________________________________________________________
That’s all for now, dear reader. Please join us again in wishing a very Happy Book Birthday to Medium by Johanna Skibsrud. Available now from our online shop or from your local independent bookstore. Happy reading!
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter (for now), and Bluesky Social, for updates on new and forthcoming releases, special features, events, and more.
Stay up to date on all upcoming events by visiting our events calendar.
