Elizabeth Arnold is the author of five books of poems, The Reef (1999), Civilization (2006), Effacement (2010), Life (2014), and Skeleton Coast (2017). She has received an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, residencies at Bellagio, MacDowell, and Yaddo, a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College, and a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Arnold's poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Paris Review, Poetry, Slate, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Literary Imagination, and The Nation. She edited Mina Loy's novel, Insel, for Black Sparrow Press in the early nineties. She has served on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA program, and is presently on the MFA faculty at the University of Maryland. She lives in Hyattsville, Maryland.
-
The ReefPoems
Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,
the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.
She told me she had read that pressure (from
a rubber band about the head) combined with
lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes
keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.
I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,
for hope. She only had to try it once.
The Reef:Poems -
The ReefPoems
So what is it, then, this being human,
except just being, here on the porch,
in the last square of sunlight,
dulled from some—
as it will seem much sooner than you think—
bearable blow.
You still can feel this last heat.
the softened and flowery breeze.
You can still hear the bird’s static:
lovers pairing up all over town.
The Reef:Poems -
The ReefPoems
Could it have been the body’s fault?
--its need to grow betraying me
as when my uterus contracted
faster and with increasing force
at what could not be driven out?
--or when the allergy to Compazine
that made my jaw go sideways hard
until it almost broke?—when the doctor
(on-call, coming just in time)
shot Valium in my open vein?
Sixty miles per hour, blood.
Where might that river take mw now, that flood?
The Reef:Poems
“Ambitious, austere, and very hard to forget . . . Arnold ends up poised between political protest and existential investigation, between an attack on the things we can do to our bodies and an amazement that we have bodies at all. Her ‘darkness speeding into darkness’ offers very little consolation, but clear-eyed readers will prize its serious work.” —Publishers Weekly [on Effacement]
"Arnold's poetry, much more mature than most writers' first books, links lyrics, slight narratives, and a bit of satire into a work of glorious affirmation. The book is a splendid read." —Mary Sue Koeppel, Florida Times-Union [on The Reef]
"For this commitment to both the autobiographical honesty and aesthetic risk, The Reef should be valuable to anyone who has been waiting for where contemporary American poetry is going." —Agni
Selected Works
