Blue in Green
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9780226783918
Blue in Green
Poems that address interpersonal connections while navigating life and care amid disease and disaster.
Collaboration runs through the heart of this collection. Human relationships—particularly in families—shape the poems in Blue in Green, as they consider how the question of what we expect from one another evolves into a question of what we owe. When cancer overshadows the ordinary—engrossing the labor of love, work, and friendship—disease becomes a collaborator and proposes new rules of exchange.
The forms of Elliott’s works highlight reciprocity. Here you’ll find ekphrastic poems that describe modern jazz songs, letters and letter fragments, and free verse poems in wildly variable line lengths. “When I was a wave,” the speaker repeats, each time telling a different story about intimacy and risk. Blue in Green moves through the struggle of processing the damaging interpersonal reverberations of racism, sexism, and environmental damage, while navigating intertwined personal and political incarnations of care. While a slow-growing disease burns its way through the speaker’s body, these poems reveal the feeling of perpetually existing in the shadow of catastrophe and document the slow and strange process of coming to terms with that way of living.
Collaboration runs through the heart of this collection. Human relationships—particularly in families—shape the poems in Blue in Green, as they consider how the question of what we expect from one another evolves into a question of what we owe. When cancer overshadows the ordinary—engrossing the labor of love, work, and friendship—disease becomes a collaborator and proposes new rules of exchange.
The forms of Elliott’s works highlight reciprocity. Here you’ll find ekphrastic poems that describe modern jazz songs, letters and letter fragments, and free verse poems in wildly variable line lengths. “When I was a wave,” the speaker repeats, each time telling a different story about intimacy and risk. Blue in Green moves through the struggle of processing the damaging interpersonal reverberations of racism, sexism, and environmental damage, while navigating intertwined personal and political incarnations of care. While a slow-growing disease burns its way through the speaker’s body, these poems reveal the feeling of perpetually existing in the shadow of catastrophe and document the slow and strange process of coming to terms with that way of living.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
When I Was a Wave [I was willing] 3
Last Will and Testament 00
Never Mind Why 00
Landscape is a word with fraught connotations 00
Works on Paper 00
The Lion-Wheel 00
The Fox Emerging from Shadow 00
The Winter Mirror 00
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition 00
If I Asked You To 00
Blue in Green 00
Tinder 00
A Blessing Compared to a Window 00
J-572 (431) I 00
Composition No. 311 00
Water, Water, Water 00
Composition No. 152 00
A Musical Sense of Life 00
When I Was a Wave [The narcissus] 00
Let me be just a little bit bitter so I remember: 00
Dear Little Song, 00
A Story about Longing 00
Dear Past and Future Metastasis, 00
My Throat in the Field 00
I imagined all the place-names as code 00
object state time space certainty 00
The Play Within 00
The Fire That Consumes All Before It 00
Dear Ilium, 00
A Letter 00
A Program for Control of Of 00
Dear Transformation, 00
A Warning 00
For Ghosted Girls 00
Notes 00
When I Was a Wave [I was willing] 3
Last Will and Testament 00
Never Mind Why 00
Landscape is a word with fraught connotations 00
Works on Paper 00
The Lion-Wheel 00
The Fox Emerging from Shadow 00
The Winter Mirror 00
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition 00
If I Asked You To 00
Blue in Green 00
Tinder 00
A Blessing Compared to a Window 00
J-572 (431) I 00
Composition No. 311 00
Water, Water, Water 00
Composition No. 152 00
A Musical Sense of Life 00
When I Was a Wave [The narcissus] 00
Let me be just a little bit bitter so I remember: 00
Dear Little Song, 00
A Story about Longing 00
Dear Past and Future Metastasis, 00
My Throat in the Field 00
I imagined all the place-names as code 00
object state time space certainty 00
The Play Within 00
The Fire That Consumes All Before It 00
Dear Ilium, 00
A Letter 00
A Program for Control of Of 00
Dear Transformation, 00
A Warning 00
For Ghosted Girls 00
Notes 00
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