Through the use of nuanced observation, rich language, and an original voice, Elline Lipkin explores contemporary womanhood, the concerns of travel, cross-cultural themes and family legacy. Recalling the feminist themes of Adrienne Rich, the steely resolve of Sylvia Plath, and the feeling for loss and spliced cultural heritage that Eavan Boland expresses, this work serves as the next link in a lineage of women poets. In poems such as “Response to Miss Havisham” and “Ars Poetica With Lines by Dickinson” the poet responds to her foremothers within the world of literature. Yet in poems such as “Rara Avis” and “At the Corner of Sunset and Morningside” she places herself uniquely within her own landscape, at her own desk, and in her own voice. Other poems such as “My Parents Meet at La Grande Place,” or “My Grandfather’s Last Bird” connect language and family as a fractured heritage, one that has allowed for “a split of words, a splice of vows,” as the poet writes in “Sweet Asylum.”
Praise for The Errant Thread
The Errant Thread is a volume of wonderful fits and starts: well-built narratives are suddenly interrupted by a cryptic epithalamion. Short lines ease into spacious distances and big, ambling-paced arguments. An epigram suddenly grows a long neck and becomes an elegy. A lyric shears off into a one-line ending . . . . There is real verve, real invention and, above all, true craft . . . showing what the reader most wants—a poet certain of the craft, a writer certain of what the craft is there to do. —Eavan Boland, judge, First Book Award 2004
Elline Lipkin grew up in Miami, FL, and attended Wesleyan University. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 1994 and her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston in 2003. She has worked as an editor in both New York City and in Paris. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Margie, North American Review, The Texas Review, and in The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. Currently, she is studying contemporary American women’s poetry as a Beatrice M. Bain Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley.
