Elizabyth A. Hiscox is the author of Inventory from a One-Hour Room. She served as Poet-in-Residence at Durham University (UK) and is recipient of Arizona Commission on the Arts and Vermont Studio Center Grants. Also selected for the Seventh Avenue Streetscape public-art initiative, her poetry was displayed on a central-Phoenix billboard for a year in conjunction with the city's First Friday art walks. Hiscox holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a PhD from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. She has taught writing in England, the Czech Republic, and Spain and currently instructs at Western State Colorado University where she is founding director of the Contemporary Writer Series.
In Elizabyth Hiscox's impressive debut collection, Reassurance in
Negative Space, there are poems about art and loss and ecology,
reindeer moss and netsuke, the precariousness of 1950s high-heeled
bedroom slippers. Her poems are tightly, urgently made. Hers is a
poetry held together by ingenious double meanings and wordplay,
twinnings and twinings, paradox, subtle jokes and puns, fierce and
delicate ironies, a rigorous intelligence and a vigor of spirit so
charged and fluent that whatever she puts before us takes on
resonance and import.
-- Nancy Eimers, author of OzElizabyth Hiscox's new collection,
Reassurance in Negative Space, is haunting in the way that
brilliance of mind and vision encounter an almost secret
vocabulary. This is the revealing intercession of one road upon
another in the outskirts of Rome a hundred years past. It is also
the infrared optics of ideas of negative space peering into
previously unobserved, undisturbed dark matter. A few of the poems
surprise utterly, have almost a pre-creation memory for us of
things that startle and seem true. She is a terrific and sometimes
very funny poet of the first order.
-- Norman Dubie, author of The Quotations of BoneThere is
throughout this volume a deep and humane lyric wisdom, an almost
fatalistically brilliant humor. . . . Here is a debut collection
bold enough to cast an eye on Truth in poems that are both
narrative (storied) and innovative, necessary poetry.
-- Cynthia Hogue (from the foreword), author of In June the
Labyrinth"All angels pant as surely as they part"--Elizabyth
Hiscox's Reassurance in Negative Space studies the relationship
between negative capability and communion. Between art and comfort.
No rote reassurance is sought after or offered in these pages--the
chocolate bunnies (better than Lent) are delicious but hollow. And
after cataloguing and deeply considering the negative spaces of
art--from the tiny details of a series of Japanese netsuke
sculptures, to Archeology Today articles, to pieces of literature,
music, architecture, painting--Hiscox breaks a tender heart with
this equivocal and necessary advice for her reader: "Fall already,
beautiful." In this gorgeous and spiritually rugged ekphrastic book
I do pant, I do part, and I do fall.
-- Sarah Vap, author of Viability
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