Imagining how the philosopher imagines is one way to read and learn a philosophy and is especially suited to the practice of poetry. Sometimes poetry has the ability to be the reality when philosophy can only describe it. Philosopher at the Skin Edge of Being marches through the seasons as Jia-li, a mountain woman, and a girl philosopher inhabit their cosmos, sluicing philosophy of antiquity through twenty-first century existence. They imagine the world as the sages may or may not have.

Vectoring through the personae of a Chinese girl and a Greek philosopher, Susan Andrews Grace’s Philosopher at the Skin Edge of Being imagines a new Gnoticism in a delightfully accessible poetic narrative. This long poem posits anew the old meditation on the one and the many through Grace’s masterful poetic skill at sustaining the music in language while allowing some reflective distance from the disillusionments of the present. This is thought-provoking poetry, beautifully composed and close enough to touch. – Fred Wah

‘The Good is gentle, mild, and very delicate’: Susan Andrews Grace opens her new collection, Philosopher at the Skin Edge of Being, with these words of Plotinus, which orient her poems within an ethics and aesthetics of compassion and delicacy. The philosophies of Plotinus and Laozi are re-imagined by a ‘girl philosopher’ attentive to nature’s changes in tulip, pomegranate, water, snow, pine tree, grass – in red of blood-birth, moon and cells. Susan Andrews Grace’s work in fabric arts is evident in motifs of embroidery, sewing, and knitting, in silks the colour of sky. In these poems, beautiful and ‘bold [in]intellection, ’ poetry and philosophy converse. They are a delight to read and reread. —Hilary Clark