The If Borderlands: Collected Poems

by Elise Partridge

The first collection of poems spanning the beloved Canadian poet's short but dazzling career.

Elise Partridge’s poetry has been widely admired for its scrupulous truth to life and meticulous, glittering craft. Whether writing about family and friends, the natural world and the daily round, or serious illness, Partridge was, as Rosanna Warren has said, “a poet of brilliant precisions. Each line represents a new, glinting angle of thought. . . . The result is an art of eerie compassion and an almost hyper-realist perception of the small.”

This new collection includes all the poems that Partridge prepared for publication during her lifetime as well as a selection of uncollected or unpublished poems.

Genres: Poetry

272 pages, Paperback

Published March 21, 2017

About the author

Elise Partridge (1958–2015) was born in Philadelphia and grew up nearby. After graduating from Harvard in 1981, she received a second Bachelor of Arts from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a Marshall Scholar. She returned to Harvard for a Master of Arts and then took a degree in writing from Boston University. In 1992 she moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she lived with her husband, a teacher of medieval literature, for the rest of her life. She taught writing and literature at several universities. Fielder’s Choice (2002) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poems published in Canada. Chameleon Hours (2008) won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 2009, and was a finalist for the BC Book Prize that year. Her third book, The Exiles’ Gallery, was published in 2015. Partridge’s work has been anthologized in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Southwest Review, Yale Review, Slate, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, PN Review, and Poetry Ireland Review.

Reviews

[ems · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, eclectic

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and affecting collection that in its construction gives the impression of charting the arc of a life spent writing. Incredibly intimate vignettes of nature, self, others, society and mortality. One of the best of the NYRB poets series.