Description
Serenade by Brooke Ellsworth (Octopus Books, paperback)
Publication Date: December 19, 2017
Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Brooke Ellsworth’s first full-length collection takes on the question of what poetic expression — “where sentences come from” — looks like if we reject the sources of oppression that pre-exist it. Taking their cue sometimes from haibun, other times from ekphrasis, the poems in SERENADE are formally restless and multi-modal-but sustained by a feminism that defines itself by rage that is collective and private, mythological and feral. SERENADE is a book that arrives as though chewed out by the political and ecological “turnstile event of monstrosity,” and whose authority lies in its nuanced vulnerability: “My authority, reader, is that I am illegible like an oil shale mine spreading its shaky legs.”
“Brooke Ellsworth grabs the detritus and heartache of our age and squeezes hard. Of course a lot escapes between her fingers, it’s the poems. Sometimes they feel like elegies for people who don’t know they’re dead: ‘the stupidest question you get / is if you’re lonely.’ You wonder whether SERENADE is coming from ghosts or the newsfeed or Mina Loy or punk rock or what – you don’t always know who’s singing, or if singing’s all it is, but there’s a cut-off ear listening in the grass.” — Mark Bibbins
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