Silk Purses and Lemonade by Elizabeth Robin

$14.99

-Maybe if I shave my legs Spring will come- opens Elizabeth Robin‘s poem –Silk Purses,- a line that suggests the way this collection voices both the mundane and grander concerns of our lives, sometimes with a sly irony. This silk purse is capacious. The collection recognizes language’s Orwellian misappropriation, as in -synecdoche that shapes horror- from -The Problem With Words- and mourns the irreversible loss of natural places, like -the dune line/well, that’s a highway now. I hear winter/the lake froze solid, a shortcut to the grocer’s- in -Under a New Jersey Moon.- And, while -Winter’s a poor time to become a widow,- we do not disbelieve this speaker when she says, -I am John Wayne- because this collection’s voice encompasses several kinds of loss with insight, irony and toughness.

–Dr. Mary Moore, Professor Emerita, Marshall University; author of Flicker (2016 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize), Eating the Light (Sable Books Chapbook Award), and The Book of Snow

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Silk Purses and Lemonade

by Elizabeth Robin

$14.99, paper

978-1-63534-173-7

2017

Silk Purses and Lemonade emerges from a comment that Robin “start seeing the glass as half full.” Turbulent months watching her brother fight and succumb to acute myeloid leukemia makes this difficult. A world callous to the challenges faced by refugees, a sensitive ecosystem, true democracy and human rights, teases at her ability to find hope. And yet, she does, in poems that mark a journey through a tangle of grief, loss, and witness. Here she offers a steadfast belief in human will, the integrity to shed pasts and persevere through that jungle.

Elizabeth Robin retired to Hilton Head Island after a 33-year teaching career to devote herself to writing. She began with Becoming Mrs. L, a still unpublished teaching memoir. She started a children’s book series; Gracie Learns English and Gracie’s Secret World currently seek a publisher. Then she found poetry as a response and outlet to a fresh grief, watching her brother battle acute myeloid leukemia for 27 months. Her first poem, -A Lowcountry Path- was published in a local magazine January, 2015. A poet of witness and discovery, she relates both true and fictional stories about her Lowcountry present and world-traveling past. Writing offers her a lens to view the world, and a strategy to thrive within its madness. She straddles both through a non-fiction series she calls Life in Third Person and the poetry of Silk Purses and Lemonade. -Life in the Pink Palace- chronicles in prose a week she spent in an ICU waiting room hoping her son would survive. He did. -Beware of Flying Pigs- navigates similar emotions in a poem. While many find faith carries them, Robin pins hope to compassion, sheer will, and the integrity in acceptance. Her work appears in The Fourth River, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, I am not a silent poet, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Curly Mind, The Skinny Journal and locally in The Breeze and the Island Writers’ Network’s Time and Tide. See more at www.elizabethrobin.com.