From award-winning writer Johanna Skibsrud, Medium 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.

Helen of Troy, Anne Boleyn, Shakuntala Devi, Hypatia of Alexandria, Marie Curie: Medium interprets the voices of women vilified over time, silenced by famous husbands, forced into sex work, or wrongly accused. Reckoning with the dominant historical narratives of each woman’s era, Skibsrud underscores the power of poetry to bring about new formulations for understanding the relationship between past and present, self and other.

These deeply resonant and performative poems use language as a bridge across experience, sensibility, and time. Each exploration begins with a brief vignette inspired by the “vidas” that once began manuscripts of the troubadours. Both vidas and poems provide lyrical reinterpretations of real and imagined elements in the lives of scholars, scientists, computer engineers, mystics, entrepreneurs, artists, nurses, and other leaders.

Johanna Skibsrud is a novelist, poet and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona. Her debut novel, The Sentimentalists, was awarded the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, making her the youngest writer to win Canada's most prestigious literary prize. The book was subsequently shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Award and is currently translated into five languages. The New York Times Book Review describes her most recent novel, Quartet for the End of Time (Norton 2014) as a "haunting" exploration of "the complexity of human relationships and the myriad ways in which identity can be malleable." "It is exhilarating", writes the Washington Post, "to join a novelist working at these bracing heights." Johanna is also the author of two collections of short fiction: This Will Be Difficult to Explain (2011; shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award) and Tiger, Tiger (2018), a children's book, and three books of poetry. Her latest poetry collection, The Description of the World (2016), was the recipient of the 2017 Canadian Author's Association for Poetry and the 2017 Fred Cogswell Award. Johanna's poems and stories have been published in Zoetrope, Ecotone, and Glimmertrain Magazine, among numerous other journals. Her scholarly essays have appeared in, among other places, The Luminary, Excursions, Mosaic, TIES, and The Brock Review. A critical monograph titled The Poetic Imperative: A Speculative Aesthetics is forthcoming. A novel, Island, will also be published by Hamish Hamilton Canada in fall 2019.

Johanna Skibsrud's profile page

"The book, through its own “mediumicity” and its exploration of such, is a portal into lives and bodies whose histories may only be understood through a particular historical narrative. And while the vidas offer specific details needed to set up the historical context of the particular woman’s life, the poems offer an emotional depth and energetic charge that give the stories heightened power."—Toronto Star

"Johanna Skibsrud’s Medium... is a rhapsody of voices and imaginative conversations with powerful historical females, both the exalted kind and the forgotten, making for a poetic dialectic that satisfies both mind and heart."—The Woodlot

"Skibsrud’s writing is throaty, beautiful and sonic." — River Street Writing

"The structure of Medium is fascinating... Skibsrud skillfully weaves these narrative notes with lyrical persona poems that act as mediums themselves, giving voice to women like Marie Curie, Clytemnestra, Sojourner Truth, Rachel Carson, and others."—The Poetry Foundation