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‘This is the kind of book that make you different when you’re done.’ – Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter
‘From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive. I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning.’
So writes Cole Arthur Riley in an unforgettable book of stories and reflections on discovering the sacred in her skin. In these deeply transporting pages, Cole reflects on the stories of her grandmother and father and encounters of enfleshed, embodied spirituality. As she writes memorably of her own lived experiences of childhood and selfhood, Cole boldly explores some of the most urgent questions of life and faith:
How can spirituality not silence the body, but instead allow it to come alive?
How do we honour, lament, and heal from the stories we inherit?
How can we find peace in a world overtaken with dislocation, noise, and unrest?
At once a compelling spiritual meditation and a tender coming-of-age narrative, This Here Flesh invites us to ponder the site of the soul by examining our capacity to rest, wonder, joy, rage, and repair – and finding that our humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it.
‘Exquisite’ – Ayo Tomenti, co-founder of Black Lives Matter
‘From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive. I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning.’
So writes Cole Arthur Riley in an unforgettable book of stories and reflections on discovering the sacred in her skin. In these deeply transporting pages, Cole reflects on the stories of her grandmother and father and encounters of enfleshed, embodied spirituality. As she writes memorably of her own lived experiences of childhood and selfhood, Cole boldly explores some of the most urgent questions of life and faith:
How can spirituality not silence the body, but instead allow it to come alive?
How do we honour, lament, and heal from the stories we inherit?
How can we find peace in a world overtaken with dislocation, noise, and unrest?
At once a compelling spiritual meditation and a tender coming-of-age narrative, This Here Flesh invites us to ponder the site of the soul by examining our capacity to rest, wonder, joy, rage, and repair – and finding that our humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it.
‘Exquisite’ – Ayo Tomenti, co-founder of Black Lives Matter
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Reviews
At a time when establishing peace within one's own soul is so vitally important, this book is a balm - reminding me to exercise the spiritual muscle of awe, to notice the simple and to find beauty in the ordinary.
This book is an invitation into the delicate weavings of family, inheritance, and pain, how they mark a bloodline, and connect a people. Riley writes with all the grace and gravity the spirit of humanity deserves. And somehow teaches us to think of ourselves as deserving of such grace, along the way. This is the kind of book that make you different when you're done.
Welcome the rising of Cole Arthur Riley's astonishing voice. This is a gorgeous and muscular work.
Timeless. This is a book I know I will return to again and again. Through this work, I am reminded I am seen. I am reminded I am free.
Exquisite. . . Arthur Riley's writing is both transporting and hauntingly intimateas she narrates this important account of generational inheritance. The stories and meditations in this book are sure to stay with you forever.
Through a narrative of family and generation, Cole Arthur Riley speaks of a Blackness so beautiful it can't be contained and a liberation that is present and possible. This Here Flesh is an invitation to hold space, return home and rediscover joy.
Beautiful. Soul-stirring. . . we rediscover a sense of awe for the bodies that make us, the stories that ground us, and the delicate grace that enlivens our spirits.
This Here Flesh is a gospel to what we remember. This book is rigorous, joyous, complex, honest and tells the story of how we get free. It is a story that would not let me go.
This book is breathtaking. Full of profound revelation and beauty woven into poetry, unforgettable imagery and story, it will stay with me long after I've read it. I will keep returning to its pages, ready to hear in Cole Arthur Riley's reflections new ways to see myself, my family, my faith and my God. Who knew truth-telling could be so beautiful?
In This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley reaches deep beneath the surface of words unspoken, wounds unhealed, and secrets untempered to break them open in order for fresh light to break through. Her personal anecdotes alongside Biblical anchors are serene vehicles through which any reader will remember the preciousness of their body, humanity, and most of all, their dignity.
[A] wonderfully winsome, heartbreakingly honest, and ever-poetic work of spiritual biography and theological reflection. While some theologians will talk in the abstract about 'incarnation,' 'enfleshment,' or 'embodiment,' Arthur Riley's book is a lesson in concreteness, in Black theology, in seeing a body, being a body, being a person rooted in time, space, stories, and very particular flesh.
A multi-layered, moving and often a poetic exploration of faith, lament, community and much more.