Pre-Order Elyse Brownell's new book Sinkhole

Elyse Brownell's new book Sinkhole won the 2014 Poetry Chapbook Contest by Monkey Puzzle Press.  The book is now available for pre-order here.

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Here's what's being said about Sinkhole:

"Elyse Brownell's Sinkhole is a poem-study of loss and the holes that define it (and us, more than we might like to admit). The poem moves in branching directions simultaneously and feels its way as present becomes past and remains an ache of absence in the next present. As the poem looks further into these holes, time opens, and the assumption that 'there is a bottom to memory' becomes questionable."

— Reed Bye, author of Catching On



"Sinkhole is a brilliant, lyrical, evocative exploration of the pain and loss trapped inside the sinkholes of every relationship. Elyse Brownell fearlessly furrows into those holes in search of a missing friend/partner/lover, the ‘you’ of the poems, but the bottom keeps falling away as one absence leads inevitably to another. Sinkhole is a profoundly ambiguous and lyrically haunting journey into the unknown."

— Bob Mayberry, Associate Professor, English, California State University Channel Islands



"There is a kind of writing or writer that is about living on the edge of what wants to be written: without reserve. Elyse Brownell went to the perimeter or brink of a sinkhole, for example, and lay down. What happens when you touch the inside of something that has no outside? How do you return? Jack Kerouac would have loved this book, I think. I did. It is a book from the heart, for you—and anyone else who wants to live wildly and all at once."

— Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue and Schizophrene



"Sinkhole is a beautifully concise poetic meditation on our modern condition, on news of sinkholes under our houses and on the ‘holes’ between us and through us. Elyse Brownell writes with wit and tenderness, integrating quotes from CNN and ABC News and from science, and finding poignant significance in how we try to connect with each other and make meaning. The opening epigraph, ‘it started in the bedroom, like so many things do,’ shows her underlying humor and psychology. These are imagistic untitled poems that accumulate by the short volume’s end to mean much more than the sum of the parts. We can try to ‘talk louder’ and scare away what frightens us, but Brownell walks to look right at our losses—singing them, mourning them, and celebrating them. I love this poetic debut and recommend it highly."

— Patricia Clark, author of Sunday Rising