Elaine Equi’s poems are asides from your cleverest friend, taking on the world with wit, confidence, and the ease of a writer fully in command of her powers. She writes “We are the excess of the story—that which it cannot contain” and in short, memorable lines that excess pops into relief, suddenly captured, visible.
Elaine Equi’s Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and on the short list for Canada’s prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Nation, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry. She teaches at New York University, and in the MFA Programs at the New School and the City College of New York.
Reviews
“Witty and zen-like . . . Each poem in this collection does the same thing. They build in insight and delight. Sentences and Rain is truly a masterwork that deserves to be read and disseminated through the population and through time.”—NewPages
“Equi relishes the stark, overlooked beauty of the quotidian in her curious, winding, fanciful 13th collection.”—Publishers Weekly
“If you can imagine it, you can probably find it here in one of Equi’s lists of objects both real and surreal.”—Library Journal
“It’s hard not to notice the collection’s duality, how it can swerve between emotion and intellect, between lyricism and something like H.D.’s imagism. This is a surprising, fully rendered collection from a poet at the top of her game.”—GoodReads
“If there is a secret joy informing Equi’s poetry, it is in the way she accepts the world as it is, without quarrel and without illusions except those that are sanctioned by art. Like a still-life specialist she gets you to see not only the red flesh of the watermelon but the beauty of the black seeds on it.”—Best American Poetry blog
Praise for Elaine Equi
“Whether celebrating clones or revising Led Zeppelin, Equi melds verse with aphorism, wisdom with wicked playfulness.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Equi sees a world that’s brighter than the rest of ours—one that’s razor-smart and beautiful just where we don’t expect it. Sparrows and hexagons. Glass air and blood orange sorbet. She gives us these things in their startling reality and ‘uncontaminated by ideas of any kind.’ But she also gives us ideas, startling in their continuous opening. Here is a poet who clearly loves the world, sees its humor, and is able to grasp it again and again, always differently, always capturing one if its single, essential lines.”—Cole Swensen
“Elaine Equi is a brilliant element, a sly observer, a wise and wry soothsayer and yep, sometimes just a ‘wiseguy.’ She’s also a trustworthy interlocutor and we can trust her to blow our circuits. An accomplished formalist, with percision, daring, and grace coupled with uncanny devotional vision, Equi continues to get away with miracles no one else does. She’s killer.”—Peter Gizzi