Ivy Page’s second collection of poetry breathes, expands, and leaves ripples in its wake as it pulls the reader through the elements that bring about change. Each of the elements are present, but in a way that embraces the possibility of moving forward, of rebirth and redefining self. By referring to the elements of self, the greater world and nature, the poems are meant to pull the reader into these transitions with the speaker.
“Ivy Page’s Elemental is an alchemical narrative. As a hermetic text, it operates in the liminal space of ‘strange symbols, written / as a secret code’ which the poet uses to hunt down the histories of the different versions of her selves, her imagined terrors that sometimes get the best of her, the aftershock of a lover’s tectonic moods. ‘Language has become luggage,’ she writes. The poems are esoteric explorations in the relationship between symbols and certainty. There is wisdom here. And beauty. And pain.”
Jill Alexander Essbaum
Author of Hausfrau (Random House, 2015) and Necropolis (NeoNuma Arts, 2008)
“In Ivy Page’s second book, time is like skin. Bodies are mapped out. Moods melt like ice. Page’s poems are peopled with ghosts of fragility and chronic illness. Elemental is a striking collection of transformation, of connections and failures, of futility marked by continued hope.”
Jennifer Militello
Author of Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013)
