Oh, look what arrived in my email!: the paperback cover of There Plant Eyes – front cover lost its braille but gained a fantastic blurb by the incomparable Maggie Nelson…
General #ImageDescription
This is the publisher’s image of the back, spine, and front paperback covers of There Plant Eyes from left to right, but I’ll paste in the info more coherently below…
Front cover:
A misty, speckled spectrum of colors ranging from light grey at the spine to a vibrant violet at center with bright spots towards the outer edge as if a couple spotlights were hitting the deep violet making those places brighter and lighter. The title, There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness, and byline, M. Leona Godin, are large and left justified with only one or two words running across the cover from left to right
“So graceful, so wise, so effortlessly erudite, I learned something new and took pleasure in every page.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
Spine and back cover are white. Text includes more blurbs, my author photo, publisher etc…
“[A] thought-provoking mixture of criticism, memoir, and advocacy.” —The New Yorker
For millennia, blindness has been used to signify thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil). Combining analyses of blindness in art, culture, and history with her own story of gradually losing her sight, in this genre-defying work, M. Leona Godin probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric world, and challenges deeply ingrained ideas about what it really means to be “blind.”
A vivid personal and cultural history, There Plant Eyes explores the fascinating history of blindness—from Homer to Helen Keller, from Dune to Stevie Wonder, and from the invention of braille to the science of echolocation. And in doing so, Godin reveals just how essential blindness and vision are to our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
“Elegant, fiercely argued Godin enlarges our understanding of the blind and sight impaired, and There Plant Eyes proves a landmark contribution to the literature of disability, comparable to Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face andJean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly—which is to say the literature of the human itself.” —The Wall Street Journal
*Read more There Plant Eyes blurbs and info HERE!
Cover design by Janet Hansen. Author photograph: “Leona Godin Faces Her Portrait” © 2020, photograph by Alabaster Rhumb, painting by Roy Nachum.
U.S. $18.00 Can. $24.00
Memoir ISBN 978-1-9848-9840-1
*Order the paperback of There Plant Eyes at Bookshop.org or wherever you buy your books!