Songs Are Like Tattoos by Elizabeth Majerus

In Songs Are Like Tattoos, poet Elizabeth Majerus uses Joni Mitchell’s classic 1971 album Blue as a destination and a point of departure to craft a moving, layered meditation on love, longing, and loss. Understanding the uncanny power that music can exert, Majerus knows that certain songs can leave an indelible mark, as impossible to shake off as one’s own skin. Addressed “to you. And you, and you. // Whoever you may be”—whether absent lovers, present loves, the reader, or the self—these poems enact the painful intimacies of distance and sorrow. Majerus makes out of such sorrow a way to “move forward, mending. / Ready to be broken anew.” Drop the needle on Songs Are Like Tattoos and read it, old school, from beginning to end, then flip it over and read it again. This rich collection, like a classic album, reveals something new each time through.

–Jonathan Weinert, author of A Slow Green Sleep, (Winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, 2021)

If you enjoy music, or have ears and a pulse, you will love this book inspired by Joni Mitchell’s oeuvre, with poems that “put the needle in the groove” and allow the reader to experience the way human relationships can “wreck [us] in the best way.” Song is the essence in lines packed with internal rhyme and assonance and the drumbeat rhythms of heart and breath. These poems surge and ebb on a river of human emotion. They have an edge, often bestowed by paradox as the speaker, a “chaste little heretic,” finds her way to a kind of neap-tide quietude, a place of adult experience mellowed by wisdom and an earned gratitude.

–Rebecca Foust, author of Paradise Drive (Press 53, 2018) and ONLY (Four Way Books, 2022)

Elizabeth Majerus has written a love letter to the artist and muse Joni Mitchell in Songs Are Like Tattoos, threading her own life and others into Joni’s lines. Richard isn’t Joni’s Richard, but he’s someone’s, as the child given up for adoption in the poem “Little Green” is not Mitchell’s daughter but another lost child who reverberates into the song. This book is an exploration of how Mitchell’s work, especially the album Blue, ghosts us back to people we used to be. Majerus, a musician herself, knows the power of music: “There are opening notes/of songs that make/my body believe/I will see you soon,” she says, and Joni is on every mix tape her speaker sends.

–Gale Walden, author of Same Blue Chevy (Tia Chucha, 1996) and Where The Time Goes (Bedazzled Ink, 2017)