A Map of Every Undoing - Large Print by Alicia Elkort (Paperback)

About the Book

A Map of Every Undoing rips through Elkort's girlhood memories with an unflinching intensity, re-assembling her life history in a hard-earned act of self-love.

Book Synopsis

Alicia Elkort's arresting suite of poems makes magic by complicating survivor archetypes and superimposing the author's journey of healing onto her inventive recreations of mythic figures. A Map of Every Undoing rips through Elkort's girlhood memories with an unflinching intensity, re-assembling her life history in a hard-earned act of self-love. These poems are defiant in their vulnerability, daring readers to look away at the same time they compel us to continue.

A Map of Every Undoing tends its wounds with meticulous prosody-a dazzling display of language and voluminous vulnerability, each poem in Elkort's collection is as much a bounty on the tongue as it is a feast for the collective hurts hungering in all of us.

--Dr. Diamond Forde, author of Mother Body

Elkort's poems surprise us at every turn with their fierce gaze, candid wit, and unflinching intelligence. She distills the bewildering tumult and turbulence that is our existence into song. Her voice, which demands and deserves our attention, is nimble, vivid, and energetic.

--Eric Pankey author of Augury and Crow-Work

Akin to Persephone "blazing a sadness" to the underworld, Alicia Elkort's remarkable debut A Map of Every Undoing takes the reader on an excoriating odyssey through childhood trauma... is an address to those who have wronged, as well as to those who have been harmed, while also functioning as a reclamation of a woman's power in the face of deathly erasure: "I write my escape, / blood drying on page after page, / folios of fire poppies." Each of Elkort's lines is so freighted with anguish and a serrated grace that I want to quote her repeatedly.

--Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos and Orange Crush

Alicia Elkort's dazzling debut, A Map of Every Undoing, offers both lovesong to the strength of women and girls and healing balm for those who've been abused, bullied, unacknowledged, unsung, or unloved...This collection is both vast as the "unfathomable universe" and personal as beloveds sharing a quiet home-spun dream ("Here is my hand & here is laughter & here is solace / & here is my house where I live by a tree"). These poems are lithe and robust at once, filled with wisdom, care, and patience of a true healer. I love this collection completely.

--Jenn Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal and River Woman, River Demo

Review Quotes

Akin to Persephone "blazing a sadness" to the underworld, Alicia Elkort's remarkable debut A Map

of Every Undoing takes the reader on an excoriating odyssey through childhood trauma. Elkort's

poems spotlight sexual abuse and survival as she inquires "Can you pour fear into a glass? / Shatter

it against the wall?" These poems are that shattering. They are emblems of the speaker's strength as

she moves through a merciless world of predators, caught between "the terror & the non-terror."

A Map of Every Undoing is an address to those who have wronged, as well as to those who have been

harmed, while also functioning as a reclamation of a woman's power in the face of deathly erasure:

"I write my escape, / blood drying on page after page, / folios of fire poppies." Each of Elkort's

lines is so freighted with anguish and a serrated grace that I want to quote her repeatedly. Though

these poems move through rot and rage, they are alchemized into a thriving survival that so

poignantly, and pointedly, ask, "Who am I to speak of beauty? Who am I not to?"

--Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos and Orange Crush

Alicia Elkort's dazzling debut, A Map of Every Undoing, offers both lovesong to the strength of

women and girls and healing balm for those who've been abused, bullied, unacknowledged, unsung,

or unloved. These deft, lyric poems draw from familial and personal history, the worlds of myth,

literature, and art, and the speaker's own vast imagination to create a cosmos capable of both

honoring and healing the wound at the center, stitching "wings to birds / bird to wings... / making

a nest of every cry & terror." Elkort, with her enduring eye to detail, recognizes and names the

beauty that surrounds and uplifts the women and girls whose lives have been ravaged by pain, and

who still, miraculously, choose love, choose "a hand / on the heart, a reassuring word... / love ... a

dedication, not a gift" in order to assure that "somewhere the pattern interrupts." This collection is

both vast as the "unfathomable universe" and personal as beloveds sharing a quiet home-spun

dream ("Here is my hand & here is laughter & here is solace / & here is my house where I live by a

tree"). These poems are lithe and robust at once, filled with wisdom, care, and patience of a true

healer. I love this collection completely.

--Jenn Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal and River Woman, River Demon