false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174175107m/368471.jpg 368471 1 SWELTER by Elise Ficarra is the Winner of the Michael Rubin Chapbook Award for 2005. Exploratory in form yet ultimately grounded in, and devoted to, everyday experience, Elise Ficarra’s Swelter seeks to rescue the lyric during the latest war’s assault on our senses. But Ficarra does so without turning away (or exclusively to the self). This visually, linguistically, and thematically layered book opts for insinuation over direct statement, parataxis over smooth transition, and openness over closure—its surfaces are as striking as the messages within. Throughout Swelter, Ficarra unleashes words onto the page, putting both text and white space to work with skill and intensity. -Brian Henry These brilliant and engaging poems do double time as the world’s most innovative and advanced Ouija board. My eyes and hands move through them with wonder and awe, the precision-crafted pages yielding insights and answers to pressing questions I didn’t know to ask before. I am thrilled to learn that poetry can be so delicate yet anchored, so winged yet soul-searchingly intelligent, that attuned imagination constructs revelations. -Stacy Doris Where words foreshadow and mirror each other in Elise Ficarra’s Swelter, where we apprehend their correspondences, our re-reading is always a first reading—startling—as of a poem which can be inhabited in multiple dimensions at once. Cut out of figures of beauty, desire, innocence, the voices here—whispers, confessions, statements, accusations—undercut each other, exposing invisible scars, scripts under scripts, a palimpsest of mythic signs addressing violations and stigmas daily undergone and untold. Reading them, we cannot be un-implicated, as they move us from ”there” to “here”, from “as if” to “as is” without our even sensing the transformation. Here, then, is a poetry of possibility and fact—no—of possibility as fact. -Benjamin Hollander 358456 2005 Swelter total:3|5:3|4:0|3:0|2:0|1:0| 3 15 5 0 368471 1889292095 9781889292090 3 0 5.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174175107m/368471.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368471.Swelter 5 0 false Fri Nov 13 23:00:35 -0800 2009 Sat Nov 07 13:11:35 -0800 2009 Sat Nov 07 13:11:35 -0800 2009 368471 1889292095 9781889292090 3 0 5.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174175107m/368471.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368471.Swelter 5 0 false Sun Jul 05 15:39:17 -0700 2009 Sun Jul 05 15:39:42 -0700 2009 368471 1889292095 9781889292090 3 0 5.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174175107m/368471.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368471.Swelter 0 0 false Mon May 26 21:49:07 -0700 2008 Mon May 26 21:49:29 -0700 2008 368471 1889292095 9781889292090 3 0 5.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174175107m/368471.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368471.Swelter 0 0 false Sat Feb 02 00:26:19 -0800 2008 Sat Feb 02 00:26:24 -0800 2008 368471 1889292095 9781889292090 3 0 5.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174175107m/368471.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368471.Swelter 5 0 false Sat Mar 17 16:45:13 -0700 2007 Sat Mar 17 16:45:13 -0700 2007 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=368471