The Cartographer's Ink

by Okla Elliott

In Okla Elliott's first full-length poetry collection, he seamlessly integrates history, philosophy, science, and personal narrative to form a literary geography that is at once erudite and accessible. Ranging from rural Kentucky to post-Soviet Russia to ancient Egypt, these poems invite the reader on a unique aesthetic and intellectual journey.

108 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 2014

Reviews

[Melissa Studdard]

Elliott is a brilliant, yet humble, guide through the loneliness, kinship, beauty, and pathos that weave the fabric of our human condition. Here, “the slick tongue of metaphysics / flicks between stained teeth” as The Cartographer’s Ink ponders both the visceral and the philosophical—the verse a lens that zooms out and in from the most cosmic to the most minute. Both fierce and tender, these poems show us ourselves anew in a light that “sets a mood / of clownish tragedy,” a light in which the “hunks of telecommunicational metal” are “just as miraculous as stars,” in which children wait in the woods to hear “God’s yodel” and the patient landmine dreams of “the wet bloom of meat and bone.”

[Yamo]

A brilliant new book of poetry by this man. I have read many essays and poems on the blog "As it Ought to Be" by Mr Elliot but this book was a surprise and delight. It was personal and raw in places and references a broad spectrum of ways we relate to each other, our environs, and trying to make sense of it all - much the way a cartographer drafts a map. Its just a lovely collection.