Firefly by Ellen Austin-Li

Ellen Austin-Li’s first poetry collection Firefly shows a meticulous eye and a careful ear that draws the reader in to this tale of an Irish lass who has a liking for the drink. Her images are startlingly precise and her metaphors show depth and understanding. These poems surge through dark seas to find—at last—a safe harbor of wisdom and determination. I highly recommend this collection where insight becomes art.

–Karen I. Jaquish, author of What Remains.

“There’s something in being wild / that keeps things alive,” says Ellen Austin-Li in her debut poetry collection, a brave book exploring addiction and ongoing recovery through a number of lenses, including formal poetry, extended metaphor, and the unadorned, yet intricately crafted truth-telling stories of a life. From the “torched … trembling” of a girl’s first drink (“Remember, no one likes a drunk girl.    Never, your mother said.”), to the playful homage to Wallace Stevens in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Cowboy Boots” (and, of course, as many looks at the woman who wears them) to the final poem, giving us the resurrection of once fading wild things now “green and growing,” Firefly provides the gift of an intimate picture of strength and courage.

–Pauletta Hansel, author of Palindrome, recipient of the 2017 Weatherford Award in Poetry

In Firefly, Ellen Austin-Li’s first collection of poetry, the reader observes the narrow spaces between darkness and light, between the abyss and the peaks. Through expressive language and metaphor the poems focus on regret and hope, acquiescence and determination. As Austin-Li writes, “light shimmers brightest on the surface of a black pond”. The poems in this collection provide an unflinching account of a journey towards higher ground, “hopeful for the possibility of ascent.”

–Leslie Clark, author of Driving in the Dark, Finishing Line Press, 2017.