Sentences and Rain

Equi’s poems are under the breath asides from your cleverest friend—witty, thoughtful, and wry.

Elaine Equi’s poems are asides from your cleverest friend, taking on the world with wit, confidence, and the ease of a writer fully in command of her powers. She writes “We are the excess of the story—that which it cannot contain” and in short, memorable lines that excess pops into relief, suddenly captured, visible.

Publication date: October 13, 2015

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 112 pages

ISBN: 9781566894210

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

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, American Poetry Review, 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.

“[Equi is] genuinely funny—like all genuine humorists, she has depth, she picks targets, she’s patient, she takes aim. . . . Equi gives us several drawing boards’ worth of characters, or friendly caricatures, framed in a wry, almost lighthearted nostalgia.” 

—American Poets

“Equi is here to remind us that our relationship to the objects in our lives can invite us to play, and to engender a new language: private, public, or something in between.” 

—Coldfront

“Sentences and Rain is truly a masterwork that deserves to be read and disseminated through the population and through time.” 

—NewPages

“[Equi’s poetry is] a gentle exercise in verbal gymnastics which delights the intelligence while at the same time not taking things too seriously.” 

—Galatea Resurrects

“From the expected to the surprising, Equi has a sharp eye for detail in the world around her, and a keen way of capturing the moment for readers.” 

—Manhattan Book Review

“This collection will add breadth and depth to any personal library. The breezy tone of these thoughtfully crafted poems belies their underlying seriousness.” 

—New York Journal of Books

“In this tense and terse collection of verse, the poet diminishes language and Western culture to its essence, the distilled acidity of its very bones.”

—Red Paint Hill

“Equi’s collection is an unabashed celebration of the pleasures of language.”

—The Harvard Crimson

"On every page of Sentences and Rain, Elaine Equi’s latest collection of poetry, you will find . . . pages thrumming with the activity of an original imagination.” 

—KGB Bar Lit Magazine

“Equi so ably demonstrates a purity of sensibility coupled with peerless brilliance that we are left breathless as we read.” 

—The Journal (West Virginia)

“Like a still-life specialist she gets you to see not only the red flesh of the watermelon but the beauty of the black seeds on it.” 

—Best American Poetry