About
Abigail Ardelle Zammit is a Maltese writer, editor, translator and educator. She read for a PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University (UK). Her poetry collections are Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh (Etruscan Press, 2025), Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (SPM, 2015) and Voices from the Land of Trees (Smokestack, 2007). Abigail’s poems, translations and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Tupelo Quarterly, Boulevard, Matter, Action Spectacle, Black Iris, Trafika Europe, CounterText, mpT, Smokestack Lightning (Smokestack, 2021) and The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2022 (Véhicule Press, 2023), amongst others. Abigail is currently researching desert landscapes from around four continents and her most hybrid collection :deserere #desertum is forthcoming with Tupelo Press (2028).
Featured Work
Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh (Etruscan Press)
This collection offers a subversive take on poetic language, destabilizing the boundaries between genres, and shifting the confessional self off-center. In 'Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh', the centrality of the self is displaced by the raw power of place and the female body’s attempt to search for meaning within the vast spatial topography that confronts it. Poems which take their inspiration from landscapes in South America, Europe, Australia and Africa, beckon the reader to experience natural beauty and climatic collapse through a language that is subtly but unashamedly political, spanning love, mortality, violence, and abuse, but always returning to the word as a source of power and regeneration. Ultimately, this is a collection about language’s ability to remain buoyant-through-change, and about poetry’s unquenchable thirst for otherness – an intense desire that, no longer satisfied with traditional models of representation, must remake itself by inhabiting the page as both canvas and visual field.
Other Works
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:deserere #desertum (forthcoming with Tupelo Press)
2028
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A Seamus Heaney Guide for Advanced Level Students
2020
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A Scatter of Leaves (bilingual pamphlet, Malta)
2016
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Half Spine, Half Wildflower (bilingual pamphlet, Malta)
2016
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Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (SPM, London)
2015
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Voices from the Land of Trees (Smokestack, Middlesbrough)
2007
