Out of the Blank

“We waited for Word to arrive / like a messiah in a stagecoach / or a sheriff riding a thundercloud.”

From acclaimed poet Elaine Equi comes her latest provocatively playful collection. “Thoughtful, witty, curious” (The New York Times), Equi’s subversive voice delicately refracts human experiences from the colors of weather to the strange ways we make sense of our bodies, from the emptiness of family homes to the flow of time itself.

Publication date: February 11, 2025

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 120 pages

ISBN: 9781566897174

Elaine Equi was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1953. She is the author of many books of poetry, including Voice-Over which was chosen by Thom Gunn for the 1999 San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and on the short list for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and The Intangibles.

Widely published and anthologized, her work is included in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, and six editions of The Best American Poetry. In 2023, she was the guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Over the years, her witty, aphoristic, and innovative work has become nationally and internationally known. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Croatian, and Arabic. She lives in New York City with her husband, the poet Jerome Sala.

A Poetry Northwest Favorite of Winter 2025

“These endlessly quotable, epigrammatic poems articulate the human experience with the ethereality of a harp and the coy trill of a cymbal. Equi’s linguistic dexterity and innovation are nonpareil.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Elaine Equi’s compositions are a door to a lavish commonplace. Her language, casual enough for a napkin, leaves you with the impression that you’ve just been told a delicious, unshackling secret.”

—Ben Shields, Artforum

"Out of the Blank gathers domestic scenes in often short-lined poems that track changes in light, memory, and TV. Observational poems wind without obsessing and record without assuming."

—Poetry Northwest

“In her splendid continuance of cascading thinking, Elaine Equi unfolds the ordinary. Her pluckiness billows in this latest collection where solid matter morphs with edgy surprise in a poetics that speaks straight to us. Nobody quite knocks it out of the ballpark like Equi!”

—Maureen Owen, author of Everything Turns on a Delicate Measure

"Nestled within the seductive mastery Equi displays, we find poems on time, taking stock, emotions, dreams, commonality. There are regrets conveyed with a sense of humor. There’s music, even Lorca’s guitar. The mood is almost unnoticeably quieter. “Sepia light/seeps / into everything.” Delight in this superb collection."

—Vincent Katz, author of Broadway for Paul

“I have always marveled at Elaine Equi’s poems. She does more with fewer words than any other poet I know. And yet, I would not call her a minimalist, but a maximalist, who writes with graceful humor and leads us gently into the dark and haunted places in our thinking.”

—John Yau, author of Tell It Slant