teri elam is a poet, essayist, and screenwriter. She has been a Two Sylvias Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize and Perugia Press finalist. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, The Future of Black: Afrofuturism and Black Superheroes, Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology, and Kwame Alexander’s This Is The Honey. Her poem “Counterpoint,” about legendary jewel thief Doris Payne, received honorable mention in december magazine’s Jeff Marks Memorial Prize contest. A Cave Canem and The Watering Hole Graduate Poetry Fellow, elam has film and poetry reviews and artist interviews in Birmingham Poetry Review, Heavy Feather Review, Callaloo, The Rumpus, Incluvie, and Rough Draft Atlanta. @terielam.stories
PRIASE:
teri elam goes digging beneath the bones to make a song of herself, her family, her people. She goes digging through trouble and tragedy, through family stories and the wreckage of love, to render a history that’s shot through with music. Here is sorrow made lyrical, tender and visceral, and joy, however muted, however dangerous, fully claimed. A grandmother disappears, leaving a daughter who pushes a daughter into the world, and pushes her back into the world again, with a strength that “splinters the bones in my body.” A father crosses the road in wind, crosses through wordlessness into a daughter’s embrace. Here is how we navigate estrangement and loss, become “each other’s echo,” “mirrors devouring each other’s reflection,” how we become, finally, “resplendent.” I finish reading “A Poem on Fillmore for Father’s Day” and immediately want to read it again – not because I haven’t gotten it, but because I want to get it more, I want to be struck again by that chord, to feel that music move me beyond myself.
— Cecilia Woloch
There are poets whose debuts announce themselves not with clamor but with an authority so assured, so undeniable, that the reader can only surrender. teri elam is such a poet. These extraordinary poems, formally daring and emotionally unflinching, confront the legacies of racism and identity, the complications of love, inheritance, and generational trauma through containment in searing formal vessels—golden shovel, ghazal, cento, and more. They dazzle, they devastate, they endure. Each poem interrogates the legacies we inherit and the small, miraculous ways we persevere—to encounter this work is to be changed forever.
— Katherine Larson
What an incredible work here. Such territory covered. From generations’ history to the green and yellow kitchen, family memories and stories woven throughout. This is a song, a lament, a tribute, a B-side, a photo album, a celebration of all that makes up the bones of this woman’s strength and resolve. Or is it a black-and-white photograph, a folded love note to all where she’s been? It is all of these, and God bless this storyteller walking through the now empty green and yellow kitchen. Humming her songs of tribute and remembrance, wiping the counters, so clean, so lovingly, you know this space is sacred.
— Ruth Form
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