The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide Review

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(More customer reviews)Nicely bound on heavy stock, this book is like a pirate's chest filled with treasure. The familiar tattoos of rebellious outliers have gone mainstream, body ink enjoying a renaissance of art and literature, a combination of art and language embellishing the flesh of devotees. The author's describe their selections as eclectic, much like a mix tape. Shelley Jackson's "Mortal Work of Art: Skin" is as unconventional as it is fascinating: each participant is given one word, part of an animate project. Each person becomes a "word". Brought together, these words might tell a story, or might not. As words die, the story changes, but "the author will make every effort to attend the funeral of her words."

Text accompanying the images explains the choice of one author or another, the fondness of phrase or portrait, lines from the work of Flannery O'Connor to William Blake. The entirety of Carey Harrison's broad back is inscribed with the text of Theodore Adorno's essay, "For Marcel Proust", a paean to genius. A personal favorite, two provocative lines on Alyssa Carver's arm that parallel the veins under her skin: "a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth." In her own words, "This sentence just kills me every time I read it."

As striking as the marriage of literature and ink are the stories that accompany these extraordinary photographs, the choice of writers, the extension of art to flesh. Katherine Barthelme wears the words "Born Dancin'" on her inner arm, this selection made more astonishing by the story by Donald Barthelme, "The Baby". A child willfully tears the pages from books, her punishment commensurate isolation in her room. As the years of potential isolation accrue, a father is faced with an ethical dilemma and the necessity of a practical solution. Presentation is all, and in this striking combination of story and the pale inked flesh of an arm, storytelling jumps from page to human canvas.

At a time when the digital technology of a new millennium is perched to swallow centuries of knowledge, repackaged in the bland-faced Kindle, it is a pleasure to leaf through this literary and artistic wonderland, where the bluebird from Charlie Bukowski's poem adorns Caitlin Colford's slender neck, the Tree of Life grows uninhibited along the spine of Debi George, a teacher, and the iconic portrait of a young Walt Whitman is proudly worn by Bryan Waterman. A testimony to the universality of art and literature, the flesh of avid bookworms carries the wisdom of writers as diverse as Theodore Roethke and Margaret Atwood, Shel Silverstein and Jack Kerouac, a celebration of "the word made flesh". Luan Gaines/2010.

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Product Description:

The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is a guide to the emerging subculture of literary tattoos-a collection of more than 150 full-color photographs of human epidermis indelibly adorned with quotations and illustrations from Dickinson to Pynchon, from Shakespeare to Plath. With beloved lines of verse, literary portraits, and illustrations-and statements from the bearers on their tattoos' history and the personal significance of the chosen literary work-The Word Made Flesh is part collection of photographs and part literary anthology written on skin.

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