Letters Under Vellum by Bonnie Emerick

“‘I have air I have / one burnt plateau,’ writes the author of Letters Under Vellum. In her first collection, Bonnie Emerick has made something gorgeous out of distance, loss, breath, and time, a poetry in the aftermath of disaster, a charred flat high lonely place the poet inhabits fully and shares with us. I love these poems for their dual openness: open hearted and open to silence, fragmentary, broken, gorgeous, and endlessly resonant. This book is ‘a way of breathing,’ and singing…—we are lucky to welcome it into the world.”

–Laura Mullen

“I and Thou, seeing and being seen, ‘the never child,’ and the recompense of holding a pen, Bonnie Emerick‘s Letters Under Vellumrubs the temporal understory of Being into shine. ‘Altogether brought by time,’ these spare lyrics trace the body’s shadow across the days. Small intimacies had and not had, wry speech acts said (and not said): ‘because words/ are material// I eventually talk.’ Titles suggest the felt forms of experience: ‘body already holds everything,’ ‘all aloneness as types of self,’ ‘my dream valleys their air.’ These condensed, open field poems gather in the eye as much as the ear. Bonnie Emerick‘s Letters Under Vellum grows creaturely, lovely.”

–Matthew Cooperman

“Despite the modernity of these moving and beautiful poems, there is an air of antiquity and wisdom that permeates them. Vellum would be the right surface on which to record them. They are spare, no excess baggage and the white spaces speak as much as the words. Though they record a journey to the interior, they never lose sight of the world we live in and its groceries and baseballs and scarves. Through all their searching, they are carried by surprise and a subtle sense of humor — “went to a laundromat/ and the dream was of going/ to a different laundromat,” or, “he said fix it but did not provide tools.” At every turn, there is a shock of recognition — “if I want to destroy/ myself with fantasy/ I can do it/ by speaking.” Emerick speaks and the reader can’t help but gasp and wonder.”

–Peter Waldor