Open The Fist is a powerful collection of poems about truth-telling, violation, and healing. Elya Braden’s magnificent and piercing poems speak directly to the heart.
–Laura Davis, author of The Courage to Heal and I Thought We’d Never Speak Again
These stunning poems by Elya Braden are both brutal and tender, not an easy accomplishment when words have a way of falling off the page. Braden keeps every line situated; every phrase calibrated like a master craftsperson building a home out of the bricks of sorrow, while elevating the spirit through the portals of redemption. Touching and evocative, sad and exhilarating, majestic and magical, these poems capture with perfect imagery and feeling the trajectory innocence takes on its way toward adulthood. I found myself unable to stop reading, going from one poem to the next, a breathtaking experience that breaks the heart, elevates the mind, and ultimately mends the soul. Such stunning work!
–Jack Grapes, author of Last of the Outsiders: Collected Poems
Elya Braden’s poems are daring, tender and utterly trustworthy. Each is a summons, through language irresistibly sensuous and enthralling, into a moment we, too, may have experienced but most probably ignored. With muscular transparency, Braden lifts the difficult, the wondrous, the raw into consciousness, into words. Though we gasp as we look in the mirror, the thrill and release of recognition is a revelation. Whether Braden is navigating the horrors of incest, the intimacies of reclaiming the body or the celebration of daring to fall in love in the face of it all, these poems are a testimony to the healing power of telling the truth, and the artistry of each makes her healing our healing.
–Kim Rosen, author of Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words
The poems of Open The Fist reveal a voice grappling with sexual trauma and a quest for spiritual rebirth. In this vibrant first collection, Braden uses poetry as a shovel and a sifter to excavate and understand what lives in her haunted body, disclosing much, but surrendering little, remaining open to us, so she can reveal uncomfortable truths that defy easy interpretation. The result is a collection of poems both terrible and tender, in which she grapples with the primal impulses of family, sexuality, and what it means to be born a girl, to survive into womanhood, and to look back. In this book, Braden is student and teacher of her own resilience. By staying present and honest, she is able to invite herself and her readers to “Open into the mouth that kisses your weeping. Open into the palm that cools your forehead. Open the fist …”
–Tresha Faye Haefner, Author of Take This Longing (Finishing Line Press), Founder of The Poetry Salon
Alicia Elkort –
Elya Braden’s first collection of poems, “Open The Fist,” is a journey into the underbelly of sexual trauma. The poems are both a reckoning and a prayer as she moves from a child’s need to be seen and loved to an adult’s need for spiritual awakening. She is honest and unsparing, both of the weight of trauma and also of the distorted feelings that develop in the wake of incest. Her poems are dotted with beautiful clothes as much as sheer terror, from “emerald-green moiré double-ruffled taffeta” to “my breath. / His hand a tarantula over my mouth.” Her poem “How To Be Deposed” is like a horror movie in slow motion, but at the root is the command to stay alive and honor life— “Don’t place a straight razor near your bath. Leave / your pearl-handled revolver at home, / tucked under your monogrammed hankies.” As many survivors of sexual assault grapple with the ephemera of memory, so does Braden. In language both stunning and child-like, she questions her own reality “Maybe I’m a loon in June. / I howl to a mute moon, pale thief / climbing the black rungs of night.” And yet, Braden ends the book on an incredibly brave note with the poem “When Joy Comes.” Here she reveals the heart inside the trauma, risking everything to come alive, “Risk the ricochet of fate, / taunt the gods / with your raucous joy!”
I am grateful the author has risked it all to share in these poems her suffering and her revelation. In that she is a light-bearer.
Linda Neal –
Elya Braden’s Open the Fist is the work of a poet of great generosity and depth. We are in the hands of a reliable narrator who conjures precise, sometimes horrifying, unforgettable images:
“His hand a tarantula over my mouth, / swallowing my prayer.” From the first poem, a manifesto, “To My Sisters in Incest I Need to Say,” to the last, “When Joy Comes,” Braden takes the reader on a powerful journey through the terrifying nights of her youth into a place where one must “love / as if that is all there is.” There is nothing cliché or trivial in her exhortation to us to “chant prayers / for every daughter of this planet, / for every forsaken mother, / for every moon-cursed father / foaming at his leash.” A well-curated, carefully wrought first collection, Open the Fist is a group of tightly related poems, woven together like a perfectly-knit sweater. It is compelling, not only because of the precision of the details and strong narrative thread, but because the poet explores the possibility of faulty memory and all the secret corners of family dynamics. We are right there with the girl who has to tighten every muscle in her body against the enemy, the girl who holds a fist up to anyone who comes too close; we are there with the woman who is opening her hand to meet a larger, safer world.
– Linda Neal, author of Dodge & Burn
Lisa Segal, author of KICKING TOWARDS THE DEEP END –
Elya Braden is a taproot poet. Deep she goes, as in the poem “Appetites” via “a thousand tiny bites / to the heart / of my own unending appetite” to find, in the poem “When Joy Comes,” “with our last breath, / then let us rejoice: / blast the trumpets, / dance and love.” In this chapbook, OPEN THE FIST, she delves into the maddeningness of bodies, libidos, and souls to push up poems that dazzle. She flushes out memory to reconstruct a narrative in poems that are sharp and rich, vibrant and lyrical. She brings back her vanquished lives to transform the cloak of her past into a present as full and sustaining as her poetry. She is a poet who weaves language, imagery, and courageousness with so deft a craft that I began the first poem in this marvelous collection immediately upon completing the last, wanting the experience all over again.
Carolyn Dragon –
Elya has an amazing way of linking words to hearts to each other. As my head races taking in the words, my heart opens and connects. It’s Elya’s way of showing the world bravery, talent and courage — to share her story and to open to your own story. I feel gifted and blessed to have these poems to carry with me, to give me hope, and to unabashedly stand with her in the beauty of truth.