Robinson, Elizabeth: Thirst & Surfeit

Threadsuns Press, paperback

Publication Date: August 15, 2023

Publisher Marketing: History, like "light untied and undone," disperses itself across time and memory. The poems in THIRST & SURFEIT reach into these fragments to interpret and sing interactions of human and environment, spirit and subsistence. Whether exhuming a bog body, riding swells with a woman pirate, rediscovering a long lost garden, or lofting a futile resistance to an oppressive regime, the protagonists in these poems understand that the "barest contraction/makes birth into exile." Reclamation is a practice of resilience, of resourcefulness: that is what these historical fragments and splinters reveal. They pierce our complacency with the terms of survival: "What is real/deforms its witnesses." Hunger signals necessity and aspiration, both thirst and surfeit. Drawing on the resources of the past, these poems make the present resonant and immediate.

"In Elizabeth Robinson's enlivening THIRST & SURFEIT, the reader is lead through approximately three millennia of radical spiritual and material. Robinson's incomparable archeological-phenomenological poetics attend to the tensions of the body, law, text, and spirit via deep time voyage and vision: 'There is no such authority / as the traveler's, the one lost in the wilderness, looking forward / to it and forbidden its foresight, ' she reminds us. The poems in THIRST & SURFEIT are compelled by the ecological, ekphrastic, feminist, and mystic, demonstrating that one mandate of the poet is to 'venture to understand the vessel on which [they] sailed' as well as attend to 'the artifacts, ' which--in Robinson's work, as always--'have pulses, ' alive in lyric landscape and the inciting ethics of listening."--Caryl Pagel