Elizabeth Scanlon

Praise for Whosoever Whole

“These candid and skillful poems from Scanlon (Lonesome Gnosis) offer original observations about aging, motherhood, and life as a woman on an increasingly unstable planet. “How is your Anthropocene going?/ How many more days of collapse/ do you have in you?” she asks the reader with matter-of-fact weariness. Scanlon pushes back against mainstream messages seeped with toxic positivity: “It’s insulting to be told not to be sad/ when there’s no recourse,/ to be told everything/ will be ok.” Elsewhere, she asks, “How do we/ unlearn the drive for more?/ We’ve never not loved excess.” Where some are paralyzed by despair, Scanlon seems animated by it. “Our own irritation is blinding, I know,” she admits, but then writes about remembering how she heard roses bloom as a child, an experience she describes as “paper crumpled in reverse.” Other moments are spectacularly alive on the page, as when she likens egg yolks to “five suns in a bowl.” In “A Request,” Scanlon breaks down the painful reality of loving that which dies and wonders whether growing old just means living more defensively. Scanlon’s excellent collection is determined to see to the heart of living and invites readers to do the same.” — Publishers Weekly starred review

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Praise for Lonesome Gnosis: 

"Nothing is off limits; in this post-pastoral metropolis of take-out and laundromats, everything gets to be big, and the otherwise discarded is made beautiful and imbued with music."                                                                               -- Matthew Girolami in Poetry International

”We’re all on a train, deep underground/going somewhere/for reasons unknown to the guy next to us,”  writes Elizabeth Scanlon in her luminous new book. Her poems, which can be intimate with interaction, and crowded with evidence of other people, are also lonely-- and lovely. I think of Frank O’Hara’s “The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.” But it’s more than that. Scanlon has a trick of sounding breezy and improvisationally melodic -- with all the immediate pleasure that suggests--and then of turning on a dime to become dark and a little dangerous. Her mixed moods, tones and dictions, and the many places she focuses her good eye--”seven silver sedans” or “the black moon” or highway billboards or a teenage thumbsucker on the subway -- make Lonesome Gnosis a delightful read." -- Daisy Fried, author of The Year the City Emptied and She Didn’t Mean to Do It

"To read Elizabeth Scanlon's Lonesome Gnosis is to be reminded you are a 21st Century thinking animal, riding trains, riding love, riding the mind as it contemplates nation and person, "being stink alive" in muto cupido: our eternal state of dumb desire. Scanlon brings such a wry, clear, bemused eye to that contemplation--how we're "full of shit but marvelous anyway"--it wakes you up: it's a delight to travel with her."  -- Dana Levin, author of Banana Palace and Sky Burial

"Scanlon delivers. She can be deeply serious, but many of these poems embrace the inclination that the human is polyamorous in its nature. I mean, the tonality in these poems, the registers, dictions, play come from a singular devotion, but the attention is multitudinous. I suppose it’s like having an octopus for a lover. You know you are dealing with one being, but it surely feels like there’s a crowd here, a good crowd."  -- James Hoch, author of A Parade of Hands and Miscreants