PRESS & PRAISE
A Map of Every Undoing tends its wounds with meticulous prosody—a dazzling display of language and voluminous vulnerability, each poem in Elkort’s collection is as much a bounty on the tongue as it is a feast for the collective hurts hungering in all of us. “I am safe in the no-/where” Elkort writes, “this soft chapel”, but these poems are never nowhere—they embody every every, clattering against the reverb of physical, emotional, and spiritual harms. These poems brandish a bladed wit that is at times both for and despite its readers, threading together a tapestry of what is most profoundly human: resilience, resistance, and the slant light of self-love.
—Dr. Diamond Forde, author of Mother Body
Elkort’s poems surprise us at every turn with their fierce gaze, candid wit, and unflinching intelligence. She distills the bewildering tumult and turbulence that is our existence into song. Her voice, which demands and deserves our attention, is nimble, vivid, and energetic.
—Eric Pankey, author of Augury and Crow-Work
Akin to Persephone “blazing a sadness” to the underworld, Alicia Elkort’s remarkable debut A Map of Every Undoing takes the reader on an excoriating odyssey through childhood trauma. Elkort’s poems spotlight sexual abuse and survival as she inquires “Can you pour fear into a glass? / Shatter it against the wall?” These poems are that shattering. They are emblems of the speaker’s strength as she moves through a merciless world of predators, caught between “the terror & the non-terror.” A Map of Every Undoing is an address to those who have wronged, as well as to those who have been harmed, while also functioning as a reclamation of a woman’s power in the face of deathly erasure: “I write my escape, / blood drying on page after page, / folios of fire poppies.” Each of Elkort’s lines is so freighted with anguish and a serrated grace that I want to quote her repeatedly. Though these poems move through rot and rage, they are alchemized into a thriving survival that so poignantly, and pointedly, ask, “Who am I to speak of beauty? Who am I not to?”
—Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos and Orange Crush
Alicia Elkort’s dazzling debut, A Map of Every Undoing, offers both lovesong to the strength of women and girls and healing balm for those who’ve been abused, bullied, unacknowledged, unsung, or unloved. These deft, lyric poems draw from familial and personal history, the worlds of myth, literature, and art, and the speaker’s own vast imagination to create a cosmos capable of both honoring and healing the wound at the center, stitching “wings to birds / bird to wings… / making a nest of every cry & terror.” Elkort, with her enduring eye to detail, recognizes and names the beauty that surrounds and uplifts the women and girls whose lives have been ravaged by pain, and who still, miraculously, choose love, choose “a hand / on the heart, a reassuring word… / love … a dedication, not a gift” in order to assure that “somewhere the pattern interrupts.” This collection is both vast as the “unfathomable universe” and personal as beloveds sharing a quiet home-spun dream (“Here is my hand & here is laughter & here is solace / & here is my house where I live by a tree”). These poems are lithe and robust at once, filled with wisdom, care, and patience of a true healer. I love this collection completely.
—Jenn Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal and River Woman, River Demon
If part of healing is a search for form, then Alicia Elkort’s collection A Map of Every Undoing twines this personal search with its lyrical mirror-partner, laying out new paths of feeling over broken sidewalks of sonnets, prose poems, elegies, and dreams. “O / broken sidewalk / your windows are open,” as she says in the first poem. The book moves from unsettling trouble toward a lush and quiet joy, or at least a series of questions about joy. Elkort’s poems begin in experience but, through inquiry, move to new places in the mind.
—Ed Skoog, author of Mister Skylight, Rough Day, and Run the Red Lights
With a language unpretentious and unapologetic, the poems of Alicia's Elkort's extraordinary A Map of Every Undoing unveil a territory of sexual violence (“the man who raped me / wore a yellow shirt”), tenderness (“Imagine you want to feed her / pomegranate seeds”) and daring intimacy (“Now comes the opening of the heart.”). The “map” in this book is more than a map of placement that tells us where we are. Alicia Elkort offers a map of search and possibilities; an invitation to explore all the places where we could be, the core of who we are (“The highest form of gratitude […] is feeling / grateful for the worst experience / Compassion is the only antidote. /[…] I am not there, yet.”
—Mariano Zaro, author of Decoding Sparrows
