Poetry. "It is rare to encounter a work that is at once a whisper and a declaration. Rebekah Edwards's debut collection of poems does just that. I read the book from beginning to end in a single sitting. Something in the language told me that I needed to read it again from the end to beginning. I realize now that I wanted to return to that line found in the very first poem, a line that speaks to the difficult truth of the poet's work, 'to wait it out.' THEN'S ELSEWHERE is a book that finds its beauty in silence, restraint and the act of waiting"—Truong Tran.
Author City: OAKLAND, CA USA
Rebekah Edwards has garnered many awards for poetry including: the Joseph Phelan Award for Poetry through the San Francisco Foundation; the Eisner Award for Poetry through the University of California Berkeley; The Editor's Prize through the New Dela Review, the state of California Ina Coolbrith Award in Poetry; the Mary Merritt Henry Award for Poetry through Mills College; and the Malcolm Wood Writing Award through the California College of Arts. She holds creative and Scholarly degrees from Mills College and the University of California, Berkeley.
“Rebekah Edward’s debut poetry collection maps the intricate geography of memory. Precise and elegant, these poem sequences follow the fluid lines and tributaries of remembering, with an incisive focus on the word as though language were a topographical location. THEN'S ELSEWHERE turns each of its words over, searching its depth and flexibility, testing the easticity of language and observation in the mind’s eye—how words trigger and encapsulate memories; how memory shifts and slips through language; how language reaches to shape memory; and how devastating it can be when language and memory short circuit. Terraformed and ready for explorers, THEN’S ELSEWHERE invites wandering its contours to discover a stunning linguistic landscape.”
—Angela Szczepaniak
“If language could hibernate and talk in its sleep about hibernation, THEN’S ELSEWHERE would be the transcript of what can be seen and said from that cave which exists between ‘the hidden and the given.’ We are roaming some kind of tension, and longing, and an attempt at reconciliation between the wilderness outside the house and the wilds of the house—an attempt to call your, he, she, me, I, my, self back: ‘come home now the cupboards are full of sand’—as the pages are full of white space and the conversational and the lyrical; it feels like I am a flat rock being skimmed over and through the lake of these states. I like to not know what’s coming, as I don’t here, and instead follow such delicately balanced spinning tops of modes of addresss—their possibilities, problems, impossibilities—into the songs of starlings.”
—Susan Gevirtz
“Rebekah Edwards’s beautifully wrought poems...bring to the objects of her attention—‘interior’s interior,’ zero, simile—a precision of fiction, a fine-grained intelligence and a hard-earned wisdom.”
—Chana Bloch