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Today's poem is "Uninvited Guest"
from The Spite House

C&R Press

Elizabeth Knapp is the author of The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 De Novo Prize for Poetry. The recipient of the 2007 Discovered Voices Award from Iron Horse Literary Review, she has published poems in Best New Poets 2007, The Massachusetts Review, The Mid-American Review, Barrow Street, and many other journals. She holds an M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University and is currently Assistant Professor of English at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, where she lives with her husband and son.

Books by Elizabeth Knapp:

Other poems on the web by Elizabeth Knapp:
"Self-Portrait as Amputation"
"I Hushed Her Then"
"Graftings"

Elizabeth Knapp's Website.

About The Spite House:

"A major poet remakes the language, as Auden wrote, and in doing so remakes the world, and this is certainly what Elizabeth Knapp does magnificently in The Spite House. Knapp’s is a language filled with leaps and breathless connections that take us through history from the Bone Church in Kutna Hora to the Dead Sea, confronting crises that range from cutting down a tree to the sometimes unspeakable horrors that she finds a way to speak about. Here is a world remade to include an ever-expanding time and space where Charon might ferry us across Lake Como or Medusa visit Hawaii. It is a world where classical and cult figures blur to suggest to us just how much is at stake every moment of our lives. This is finally our own world seen freshly and fraught with dangers, but dealt with by a gifted poet who understands all too well that ‘even your own / thoughts will betray you,’ and more, who can rise above the simple self so that she can say, ‘from the inmost fire, I carved myself.’"
—Richard Jackson

"The Spite House is a book of dark vision and broad range, haunted by intimacy and anger, by a fierce fidelity to truth and to the elusiveness of truth, by emotional, spiritual, cultural, and political landscapes that are finally inseparable aspects of a single extended investigation. These pages’ season is late winter, when only a few rare swellings on the branches hint that change may come, even as an encasing ice glitters its own shard-sharp illuminations."
—Jane Hirshfield



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