DARK BRAID

A book of poems that powerfully explores a range of personal topics from unusual angles.

Debut author Elerath creates thoughtful poetry with piquant and delightfully lyrical imagery. She explores universal themes of love (both painful and pleasurable) and sadness and sifts through the wreckage that emotions can create. She also includes expressive poems about girlhood (“The Followers of Saint Strawberry”). What sets Elerath’s work apart, however, is her examination of these concepts from offbeat perspectives, such as those of animals and arachnids (“When I Was a Garden Spider”), and in poems about such objects as a pencil and a radish. Similarly powerful is the poet’s ability to deftly weave gratifying, sensory descriptions throughout her work, including those that specifically focus on the physical body (“Ode to the Tongue”). This is especially evident in “The Lyre,” a poem about a wife who, to her own detriment, tries to fill every possible role for her husband in order to please him: “Now I know a woman can become a stone for her husband to trouble between his palms…she can be bound with wire, carved into a lyre…my wedding ring is the head of a tuning peg. When he tightens it I scream higher.” Similarly enchanting is the fablelike spirit of certain pieces combined with vivid character portraits, as in “Hansel and Gretel in Reverse,” in which the famous fairy-tale pair long to return to the witch in the woods (“I miss the cage and flame, the witch’s palms stained with ash”), and “Ugly One,” which features one of Cinderella’s stepsisters as its speaker: “yellow teeth crowd my mouth like cowrie shells, my eyes are tiny flies that flicker hunger.”

A raw and evocative debut collection.