Erin W. Elkins - Published Work

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Bottomland

“Erin Elkins’s Bottomland is both fresh and timeless. Like the poems of Po Chu I, which leap across centuries to convey directly to our senses humble, country things like the taste of fresh bamboo shoots (delicious!), Erin Elkins Radcliffe’s poems penetrate all the contemporary static that surrounds us to show us the unaltered, unalterable cycle of life. Father, Mother, children, calves and chickens, barn swallows drowned in the washtub, bees making honey in the walls which can never be tasted ‘because to extract them was to destroy the only sweetness we could keep.’ Bottomland is delicious—and, thankfully, we can extract its sweetness without destroying it.”

—Richard Cecil, author of Twenty-First Century Blues and In Search of the Great Dead

“The poems of Bottomland are visceral, gross, yet filled with fecund beauty and so, so tender—a lot like life itself. These poems do seem to pulse, bleed, lay eggs, rot, make promises, and have eyes and veins and sickness and spirit. As soon as I finished—and this has never happened to me before—I immediately started over again. I wish there were more and am anxious to read more of Erin Elkins Radcliffe’s work.”

—Bonnie Nadzam, author of Lamb and Lions

Published by Sundress Publications