Poetry. "In this remarkable new book, Elizabeth Arnold focuses on what certain bodies undergo against forces that efface them. Physical law has it that 'what pokes out gets hit.' Limbs, noses, and jaws are blown off. There are mastectomies. Prosthetic reconstruction is 'flesh displaced.' Some of those who experience it learn that there is now between them and the ones they love a wall of cancelled desire. 'One can adjust to this, they say, but not // from it.' Losses such as these italicize how unlikely it was to begin with that any soul should ever have made its way into a body out of the oblivion that precedes birth. Death too is that oblivion. Its 'fingers' open the face out of which 'something // inner joins the surface' as soon as the eyes ask for help"--James McMichael.

Author Hometown: Hyattsville, MD USA



About the author: Elizabeth Arnold has published three books of poems, The Reef (University of Chicago Press, 1999), and CIVILIZATION (Flood Editions, 2006), and EFFACEMENT (Flood Editions, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Conjunctions, Paris Review, Poetry, and Slate. She is on the MFA faculty at the University of Maryland and lives in Hyattsville, Maryland.