|
Praise for None of Us in White (Winner of the 2023 Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize):
Eve Alexandra’s None of Us in White brilliantly mines the lover’s condition, complicating its usual manifestations, romantic, filial, this work gathers through the human body itself. Alexandra’s stunning collection offers a measured recklessness, guiding through immediate necessity: “What if we unlocked all the doors? What if we took the doors off the hinges?” Opening through this work, piercing between sense and atmosphere, human and animal, is an embodied current: “electric with desire, fireflies with luminous bellies.” Alexandra’s poetry pulses, a gorgeous voice, resounding between the collective and singular, where supposition bleeds into query, “Does the mouth make a sound for gun, arrow, berry, or flee?” Rooted and inspiring, None of Us in White illuminates, a queer erotics of a strongly lived and living feminist desire: “the slit of your sex, the coal of hooves, so close, for a second, as if you were nursing at my breast. Then you were off, leaping defiantly…,” and so might we, through Alexandra’s poetry of deep intimacy and wide scope, of careful reckoning into powerful wonder. --Ronaldo Wilson, author of Virgil Kills: Stories and Carmelina: Figures
Eve Alexandra’s powerful new collection unlocks a sensual world that is acutely aware of its own potential for violence, pain, and heartbreak. Poem after poem is moving and unsettling. In the manner of Brigit Pegeen Kelly, here is a poet who can transport her readers into a world of charms, a place deer operate as sisters to the speaker, a realm that lists questions like transubstantiated miracles. The lushness of Alexandra’s language is evident in landscapes filled with purple vetch, sumac, black-eyed Susans, bleeding hearts, and Queen Anne’s lace. The intensity of emotion never lets up, and I was compelled to read and read and read. Always hoping for some relief for the speaker, for her to finally find peace and solid ground. When she says “I want to eat the whole wrecked world” I come to understand why. This collection touches a deep emotional truth and brims with significant interrogations and insight. --Didi Jackson, author of Moon Jar and My Infinity
Eve Alexandra’s None of Us in White is an unflinching book of poems—a liturgy of love, wreckage, grief, and arrival that is as visceral as it is transcendent. Rooted in intimacy, in thrall with the natural world, and run through with a sequence of charms that offer as much warning as antidote, the range in these poems is stunning—in form and subject. Alexandra’s materials—childhood, a father’s presence and loss, bodily hunger—are made new in her hands. These poems are inventive and incantatory, their language precise and alive: “My hand runs the length of the field, and the field is your torso, odd rib that caught my heart like a lacy hem.” Nature is mirror and medium, and love, a rebellion—“I am remembering how to make love. In protest.” Lyrically beautiful, but also frank, surprising, and deeply moving, this is an extraordinary collection. --Kerrin McCadden, author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes and American Wake
Eve Alexandra’s None of Us in White brilliantly mines the lover’s condition, complicating its usual manifestations, romantic, filial, this work gathers through the human body itself. Alexandra’s stunning collection offers a measured recklessness, guiding through immediate necessity: “What if we unlocked all the doors? What if we took the doors off the hinges?” Opening through this work, piercing between sense and atmosphere, human and animal, is an embodied current: “electric with desire, fireflies with luminous bellies.” Alexandra’s poetry pulses, a gorgeous voice, resounding between the collective and singular, where supposition bleeds into query, “Does the mouth make a sound for gun, arrow, berry, or flee?” Rooted and inspiring, None of Us in White illuminates, a queer erotics of a strongly lived and living feminist desire: “the slit of your sex, the coal of hooves, so close, for a second, as if you were nursing at my breast. Then you were off, leaping defiantly…,” and so might we, through Alexandra’s poetry of deep intimacy and wide scope, of careful reckoning into powerful wonder. --Ronaldo Wilson, author of Virgil Kills: Stories and Carmelina: Figures
Eve Alexandra’s powerful new collection unlocks a sensual world that is acutely aware of its own potential for violence, pain, and heartbreak. Poem after poem is moving and unsettling. In the manner of Brigit Pegeen Kelly, here is a poet who can transport her readers into a world of charms, a place deer operate as sisters to the speaker, a realm that lists questions like transubstantiated miracles. The lushness of Alexandra’s language is evident in landscapes filled with purple vetch, sumac, black-eyed Susans, bleeding hearts, and Queen Anne’s lace. The intensity of emotion never lets up, and I was compelled to read and read and read. Always hoping for some relief for the speaker, for her to finally find peace and solid ground. When she says “I want to eat the whole wrecked world” I come to understand why. This collection touches a deep emotional truth and brims with significant interrogations and insight. --Didi Jackson, author of Moon Jar and My Infinity
Eve Alexandra’s None of Us in White is an unflinching book of poems—a liturgy of love, wreckage, grief, and arrival that is as visceral as it is transcendent. Rooted in intimacy, in thrall with the natural world, and run through with a sequence of charms that offer as much warning as antidote, the range in these poems is stunning—in form and subject. Alexandra’s materials—childhood, a father’s presence and loss, bodily hunger—are made new in her hands. These poems are inventive and incantatory, their language precise and alive: “My hand runs the length of the field, and the field is your torso, odd rib that caught my heart like a lacy hem.” Nature is mirror and medium, and love, a rebellion—“I am remembering how to make love. In protest.” Lyrically beautiful, but also frank, surprising, and deeply moving, this is an extraordinary collection. --Kerrin McCadden, author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes and American Wake
Sample Poem:
Sacrament
I tried to love the sacrament of loneliness. Burnt and burnished, I bowed my
head and took nothing into my mouth. Shards of quartz and bits of tar
scarred the soft flesh of my feet, but I knew at the end of the road there was
a field, and suddenly I was standing in you. At your temple a forgotten
orchard winesap and russet sweet. The barred owl your mother cared for
nests there. The one that flew with a broken wing from her arm and back to
its cage each evening. My hand runs the length of the field, and the field is
your torso, odd rib that caught my heart like a lacy hem. We larkspur, we
garland coreopsis. We plow and we harrow. We pasture spikelets of
timothy, foxtail, sunflowers—the sap on their seed like my own mouth
shameless. Eight years I lived inside prayer, imprisoned in a locket. Your
lips unlock me. Radiant one, I want to be the seed to your sparrow. Your song
is diligent and wild. You bare-breasted above me. This season pleasure is
my new constant, my almanac. We carve our names into hickory like a
headboard. Tiny boats of milkweed set sail. I sew a pillow with the stuff. We
glisten against wool. We are not fallow. We gather our hands and bow our
heads. There is a table and bounty. We vesper, and I am astonished.
Sacrament
I tried to love the sacrament of loneliness. Burnt and burnished, I bowed my
head and took nothing into my mouth. Shards of quartz and bits of tar
scarred the soft flesh of my feet, but I knew at the end of the road there was
a field, and suddenly I was standing in you. At your temple a forgotten
orchard winesap and russet sweet. The barred owl your mother cared for
nests there. The one that flew with a broken wing from her arm and back to
its cage each evening. My hand runs the length of the field, and the field is
your torso, odd rib that caught my heart like a lacy hem. We larkspur, we
garland coreopsis. We plow and we harrow. We pasture spikelets of
timothy, foxtail, sunflowers—the sap on their seed like my own mouth
shameless. Eight years I lived inside prayer, imprisoned in a locket. Your
lips unlock me. Radiant one, I want to be the seed to your sparrow. Your song
is diligent and wild. You bare-breasted above me. This season pleasure is
my new constant, my almanac. We carve our names into hickory like a
headboard. Tiny boats of milkweed set sail. I sew a pillow with the stuff. We
glisten against wool. We are not fallow. We gather our hands and bow our
heads. There is a table and bounty. We vesper, and I am astonished.
