Little Victory by Elizabeth Kuelbs

Entering into the realm of Elizabeth Kuelbs’s Little Victory is not unlike stepping into an enchanted forest, where everything matters and is given its proper recognition. Kuelbs has come to remind us that the tiniest act can—and does—have the potential to create massive shift. It takes a brave and openhearted sorceress to look unflinchingly at our current state of affairs and offer incantations in the form of poetry to start to heal our hurting world. She brings her readers the perfume of roses and jasmine, witchy intuition and mother medicine, all in service of hope and the restoration of soulful integrity. Her deft weaving of words and her courageous authenticity make this sweet collection a remedy. May the cool and soothing waters of her words drench the grief that threatens to incinerate us all. May we all be the daughter of her poems; may we all “…rise grinning, forever crowned in grit and sky.”

–Kohenet Rachel Kann, author of How to Bless the New Moon (WORD: Bruce Geller Memorial Prize winner) and A Prayer on Behalf of the Broken Heart 

There is an urgency, a swing and a punch, in Little Victory. Sound (“the owls talon down”) pushes vision to map this wounded world and its marvelous strangeness, its precarities. Elizabeth Kuelbs’s vision sings most fiercely when she leaps toward the fantastical, imagining the rapacious world we’ve built as a dragon (“he drools for their pangolin / wine”), or the self as an ostrich avoiding what can’t be borne.

In Kuelbs’s vision we are “all of us strange wrack,” tossed up on the shore of the moment, trying to find human connections to guide us through the howl. Trying to protect the ones we love, “What would you do to ban chlorpyrifos/ from his blooming brain, sulfur dioxide // from their pink lungs.” A lot. We’d do a lot, if we saw as clearly as these poems do.

–Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica

Little Victory exists at an intersection of the environment and politics, meeting those two giants with toughness and tenderness. A beautiful book—one that knows that the beautiful is not always pretty, but rather, as she writes of her daughter playing in a puddle, is “crowned in grit and sky.”

–Jason Gray, author of Radiation King and Photographing Eden