Poetry by Elaine Equi

April 1, 2003 • 6 x 9 • 100 pages • 978-1-56689-142-4

Clear yet complex, these poems animate the things closest to us—objects, fantasies, culture high and low.

Nuanced, rich in meaning, and innately accessible, these poems revel in Elaine Equi’s maturity of technique and vision. In this collection, we find her deftly exploring her surroundings and taking a close look at the way we inhabit things and the way they inhabit us. Clear yet complex, these poems animate the things closest to us—objects, fantasies, culture high and low. As Elaine Equi states, “Many writers think the goal of writing is to discover the unknown, but this book argues that to discover the known is even more interesting.”

About the Author

Elaine Equi, author of Click and Clone (Coffee House Press, 2011), was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and raised in Chicago and its outlying suburbs. In 1988, she moved to New York City with her husband poet Jerome Sala. Over the years, her witty, aphoristic, and innovative work has become nationally and internationally known. Her last book, Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and on the short list for Canada’s prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize.

Among her other titles are Surface Tension, Decoy, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Award, and The Cloud of Knowable Things. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Nation, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry. She teaches at New York University, and in the MFA Programs at the New School and the City College of New York.

Reviews

“Friend to objects, saints and dead celebrities alike, Elaine Equi is the real McCoy: a keeper of the sacred flame of language-joy.” —L.A. Weekly