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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
by Elaine Equi
"We waited for Word to arrive/ like a messiah in a stagecoach/ or a sheriff riding a thundercloud."
From acclaimed poet Elaine Equi comes her latest provocatively playful collection. "Thoughtful, witty, curious" (The New York Times), Equi's subversive voice delicately refracts human experiences from the colors of weather to the strange ways we make sense of our bodies, from the emptiness of family homes to the flow of time itself.
"These endlessly quotable, epigrammatic poems articulate the human experience with the ethereality of a harp and the coy trill of a cymbal. Equi's linguistic dexterity and innovation are nonpareil." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In her splendid continuance of cascading thinking, Elaine Equi unfolds the ordinary. Her pluckiness billows in this latest collection where solid matter morphs with edgy surprise in a poetics that speaks straight to us. Nobody quite knocks it out of the ballpark like Equi!" —Maureen Owen, author of Everything Turns on a Delicate Measure
"Nestled within the seductive mastery Equi displays, we find poems on time, taking stock, emotions, dreams, commonality. There are regrets conveyed with a sense of humor. There's music, even Lorca's guitar. The mood is almost unnoticeably quieter. 'Sepia light/seeps / into everything.' Delight in this superb collection." —Vincent Katz, author of Broadway for Paul
"I have always marveled at Elaine Equi's poems. She does more with fewer words than any other poet I know. And yet, I would not call her a minimalist, but a maximalist, who writes with graceful humor and leads us gently into the dark and haunted places in our thinking." —John Yau, author of Tell It Slant
This information about Out of the Blank was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Known for her witty, aphoristic, and innovative work, Elaine Equi is the author of over ten collections of poetry. Her books include Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize; Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Sentences and Rain; and The Intangibles. In 2023, she was the guest editor of the annual anthology, The Best American Poetry.
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People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
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