September 13th, 6:30pm at Head House Books: Elisa Gabbert Discussing Normal Distance. Please join us here at Head House Books to listen to Elisa Gabbert discuss her new book Normal Distance
Normal Distance is a book about thinking and feeling, meaning and experience, trees and the weather, and the boredom and pain of living through time.
Elisa Gabbert is the author of The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays and The Word Pretty. She regularly writes a poetry column in The New York Times.
For more information please visit Elisa's website at elisagabbert.com
“Elisa Gabbert’s newest book of poems, Normal Distance, is a must-read. It is a work of full force and cannot be forgotten long after you close its pages. Its intricate language mazes and areas of language play create a landscape of full sensations, thoughts, and pure emotion. In the book, you enter places where the starkness of our time is met with the tenderness of what it means to be a human. Places where the ‘lindens’ both ‘bloom’ and ‘didn’t bloom,’ where ‘suffering was less absurd,’ places where the ‘inflection of a spell’ ‘turns off your power,’ where ‘everything is a monolith,’ places with ‘frightening’ ’empty space,’ and where ‘youth is a kind of genius.’ These poems are places where anything can be anything and where what the poet feels intimately can still be everything. As Gabbert writes, ‘We are born not remembering why we walked into the room,’ and I believe her. This is a book that you will remember for a long time, after birth and death, and into the eternal space where poetry still lives.” — Dorothea Lasky, author of Milk