Book Description

Poetry. Here is a calendar full of long shadows, a guidebook of unlikely bursts of music, and we couldn't ask for a better guide than this keenly perceptive, wry, plucky poet. In Laurie Filipelli's ELSEPLACE, as in Keats, we may not know if we wake or dream but that uncertain state blurs nothing, rather it clarifies the mysteries that are our befuddlements and salvations.--Dean Young In Laurie Filipelli's debut collection, lyrical prose poems that evoke the sorrows of the calendar year are juxtaposed with feisty odes that soar and float and sing and refuse to be tethered. Elsewhere could be anywhere, but ELSEPLACE is brilliant and magical. It's where the cat's been when it reappears, it's a place you have to squint to see, it's a town that exists only when you name it, it's the wig shop in Tyler, Texas, it's Poem City (the wonderful book in your hand!), and Paris, Las Vegas, where the way to win is to forget what you want.--Maura Stanton Part oracle, part anchor, the poems in ELSEPLACE hover like the recurrent image of a balloon caught between imminences. Filipelli's poems are driven less by containment than bafflement, by the ferocious tenderness of invention. For ultimately, these are love songs to maybe, to the 'crooked O, ' to 'wind's eye beginning to open.'--Elyse Fenton