elizabeth cantwell
books
All The Emergency-Type Structures
Inlandia Institute, 2019
ISBN-13: 9781732403260
104 pp.
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Nights I Let The Tiger Get You
Black Lawrence Press, 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1625579065
62 pp.
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Elizabeth Cantwell’s poems unfold in the nightmarish space between seeing a monster and discovering you are unable to scream.
Nights I Let The Tiger Get You transpires in that liminal moment between sleep and waking, when the objects of everyday life have grown distorted and ominous. The poems in this book touch on picnics and metamorphosis, addiction and taxidermy. How can words absorb a history that keeps resisting expression? "And in the space inside your head, between / your eyes and your ears, an entire / planet throbs."
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Premonitions
​Grey Book Press, 2014
28 pp.
Premonitions is a warning, a prayer, a broken mirror, a lost coyote. "The poems are at once beautiful, liquid, and thought-provoking," Scott Sweeney says.
It is a little chapbook for people who worry about things after about 11:00 pm.
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All the Emergency-Type Structures is a poetic survival manual for those in need of shelter from climate change, American life, motherhood, technology, death, and extinction. These poems navigate both cultural anxieties—climate change, American consumerism, technological creep—and personal anxieties—motherhood, apocalyptic thinking, suburban complacency. What does it mean to face a future in which building emergency-type structures may be necessary for our existence?