Description: Poetry. Fiction. Hybrid Genre. "Colen is not timid about addressing the perversities of American culture head-on... The subjects are dark, generating perhaps more discomfort than comfort, but Colen reminds us that the human heart is still quite functional."--D. A. Powell
Brief description: Elizabeth J. Colen is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010), Waiting Up for the End of the World (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), and WHAT WEAPONRY (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), flash fiction collection DEAR MOTHER MONSTER, DEAR DAUGHTER MISTAKE (Rose Metal Press, 2011), long poem / lyric essay hybrid THE GREEN CONDITION (Ricochet Editions, 2014), and Your Sick (Jellyfish Highway, 2016), co-written with Carol Guess and Kelly Magee. She teaches at Western Washington University.
Review Quotes:
The vortex of bold words that whip through Elizabeth Colen's What Weaponry are messages fully articulating a new form of body. A new sense of love. Radiant and containing "all electric, all thought" the language found in Colen's latest book generously provide a jittery syntactical jolt. What is constant in these dazzling lyrical vignettes is the desire for intimacy in the throes of love's changing face. What Weaponry swerves, plumbs, sears and burns for that which eludes but is right before us. It's a remarkable book. --Oliver de la Paz
Handsomely forged like the best scenes of the best art films, Elizabeth Colen's What Weaponry moves between expansive seashores and claustrophobic interiors to illuminate or exorcise the emotional interstices we all inhabit. Such violence and tenderness rubbing up against each other! It's impossible to look away. And if, as Colen insists, "There is no mystery here," it's because she has exposed the beautiful ugly subcutaneous. --Debra Di Blasi
In What Weaponry, Elizabeth J. Colen has done something much more challenging, much more nimble than write a book of prose poems. She has created a wonder, a linear circularity - "We haven't slept but tired's come back to wild elation the way all things circle back to meet their opposites" - she has embedded a book of poems inside a book of prose. "Say you didn't say his name. Say you sang it." So I won't. I will. I just have to follow her. Let her make music with the stories she puts in my mouth. Let her wake me. --TC Tolbert