Out of the Blank - by Elaine Equi (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"We waited for Word to arrive/ like a messiah in a stagecoach/ or a sheriff riding a thundercloud."

From acclaimed poet Elaine Equi comes her latest provocatively playful collection. "Thoughtful, witty, curious" (The New York Times), Equi's subversive voice delicately refracts human experiences from the colors of weather to the strange ways we make sense of our bodies, from the emptiness of family homes to the flow of time itself.

Review Quotes

A Poetry Northwest Favorite of Winter 2025

"These endlessly quotable, epigrammatic poems articulate the human experience with the ethereality of a harp and the coy trill of a cymbal. Equi's linguistic dexterity and innovation are nonpareil." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Elaine Equi's compositions are a door to a lavish commonplace. Her language, casual enough for a napkin, leaves you with the impression that you've just been told a delicious, unshackling secret." --Ben Shields, Artforum

"Out of the Blank gathers domestic scenes in often short-lined poems that track changes in light, memory, and TV. Observational poems wind without obsessing and record without assuming." --Poetry Northwest

"In her splendid continuance of cascading thinking, Elaine Equi unfolds the ordinary. Her pluckiness billows in this latest collection where solid matter morphs with edgy surprise in a poetics that speaks straight to us. Nobody quite knocks it out of the ballpark like Equi!" --Maureen Owen, author of Everything Turns on a Delicate Measure

"Nestled within the seductive mastery Equi displays, we find poems on time, taking stock, emotions, dreams, commonality. There are regrets conveyed with a sense of humor. There's music, even Lorca's guitar. The mood is almost unnoticeably quieter. "Sepia light/seeps / into everything." Delight in this superb collection." --Vincent Katz, author of Broadway for Paul

"I have always marveled at Elaine Equi's poems. She does more with fewer words than any other poet I know. And yet, I would not call her a minimalist, but a maximalist, who writes with graceful humor and leads us gently into the dark and haunted places in our thinking." --John Yau, author of Tell It Slant

Past Praise:

Praise for The Intangibles

Finalist for the 2019 Big Other Book Award in Poetry
Hyperallergic, "Favorite Poetry Collections of 2019"

"Always count on Elaine Equi's nimble gymnastics to flip the ordinary around and create something rich and strange . . . These poems do not wear their brooding hearts on their sleeves but rather flirt and banter, drawing us close before revealing their ruminative complexities." --Albert Mobilio, Hyperallergic

"This is a book for now and for the future, a panacea and antidote to the fear of the inane unknown. Equi's elegant control of line, image, percolating observation is always a taut surprise. I feel better already. Inside these subtle poems, complete little universes, there's never a dull moment." --Anne Waldman, author of Bard, Kinetic

Praise for Elaine Equi

"Whether celebrating clones or revising Led Zeppelin, Equi melds verse with aphorism, wisdom with wicked playfulness." --Entertainment Weekly

"These poems, brief as they sometimes are, simply-stated as they almost always are, open up a ground, a web, of the conscious and subconscious dailiness we all experience but rarely self-examine or seek to understand." --New York Journal of Books

"There is a lot of fake poetry out there. Equi is real. She changes the way you look at things. You cannot fake the authenticity that informs even the most casual of her observations." --David Lehman, founder and series editor of The Best American Poetry

About the Author

Elaine Equi was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1953. She is the author of many books of poetry, including Voice-Over which was chosen by Thom Gunn for the 1999 San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and on the short list for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and The Intangibles.

Widely published and anthologized, her work is included in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, and six editions of The Best American Poetry. In 2023, she was the guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Over the years, her witty, aphoristic, and innovative work has become nationally and internationally known. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Croatian, and Arabic. She lives in New York City with her husband, the poet Jerome Sala.