With clarity and compassion, Elaine’s writing reads like you’re having an extended conversation with a close friend, who happens to be capable of fully relating a range of emotions via the languages of love and science. Poem after poem is a thoughtful, serious, fraught “shattered glass of identity,” delving under the topography of their onerous occasions. “Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough,” Emily Dickinson once said; “It’s a marvel we don’t come into this world slipping / out,” Elaine writes, a tender acknowledgement that, as it was for Dickinson, joy and pain Elaine are the twin hymn-notes from which she sings.
–David Biespiel, author, A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love
After a stroke at age 27, Elaine found herself in “The Vale of Soul-Making,” and this collection, Inheritance, is her song from that terrain of severe disability. With a juxtaposition of imagery — mechanical and natural, quotidian and holy — the poet struggles with “how to line up facts with truth.” In this visceral, urgent collection, poetic muses and ekphrasis help the speaker create self-portraits. She says she’s “a nest rigged,” and “a bird…even if I also must be its cage.” Through these heartbreaking and tenacious poems, the speaker invites us to “Take it from me, my grief, I mean — it’s for sale.”
–Ellen Bass, Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets
As someone who has suffered a brainstem stroke and who lives with a rare connective tissue disorder (EDS), Elaine has found poetry an abiding solace that beckons her to write. These are moving poems “filled with the losses my lithe legs, / wandering in abroad exhibit halls, / never walked into finding.”
–Arthur Sze, author, Compass Rose, 2015 Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
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