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"In Field Notes, Elizabeth Cunningham writes in microdoses that throw space open like sound amplified by a pinhole. Williams and Olson, among others, imagined poetry as fields of openness in the same way one might imagine a page with no print is blank, is silence: 'there’s no hunting in suburbia.' Don’t believe it. By some invisible folding of form into technique, Field Notes robs modern astonishment of this naiveté, this innocence, as if urging it, and so us, to grow up. Cause that page was never blank, that silence isn’t quiet in the least—suburbia is a killing field. So Cunningham reimagines the field’s openness as something the hunted dare not traverse, as something full of incipient destruction: a dry field isn’t absent moisture; it’s already ablaze. Field Notes implies that writing—like growing up—means we mark where a few of those fences stood before they got blown away; then life is that thing we do in the crosshairs." —Ed Pavlić "These poems bop to a ghostly jazz. It's a haunted songbook, this collection; it's a hex against the provisional world.” —Jay Hopler “With clinical precision, E. G. Cunningham traces and dissects the intimate contours of the Self and the Other, thereby creating new topographic and linguistic records of what happens when we attempt to decipher our ‘ordinary’ lives. I will surely carry this little atlas with me for quite some time to come. In short, Ex Domestica is a truly stunning and haunting debut.” —Daniele Pantano “Cunningham’s work is a genre of quiet with quivering subtitles—a translation of the break in the wind, the space between breaths. In this collection there is so much sparkle, sometimes from the sun’s last glinting on the snow, sometimes the flicker on a dead doe’s eye. Apologetics interrogates the connection between nature and mind and space and home with a pure voice that wounds in its beauty.” —John A. Nieves “Oranges for Venus is a small book of inverted poems confusing logic and idiom, climate tragedy and paradise. It’s laser and letterpress-printed using deceased trees left over from other structures. Limited edition of 150, hellbound by hand, and compact: 5.5”x4.25”. —Cameron Lovejoy, Tilted House Press. Winner of the 1br/3bath Editor’s Choice, 2023. |