A 2001 and 2004 Pushcart Prize nominee, Elizabeth Volpe lives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including: Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Connecticut Review, River Styx, Cave Wall, and roger. She won The Briarcliff Review 2004 Poetry Contest, the 2006 Metro Detroit Writers Contest, and the 2008 Juniper Prize fromAlligator Juniper. Her chapbook, Brewing in Eden, won […]
Do you want to remain completely unharmed? —Jorie Graham My husband tells of the time he parachuted on a dare from his son, how unflaggingly mindful he was as the door of the plane slammed open against the hard slap of sky, how his hands on the struts turned to iron claws as the trainer […]
Fact is, I want to like them, if for nothing else than their name, all darkness and mystery, the click in my mouth, my lips closing and falling open. But I hate they way they hammer the roof, the raw unstitching as their green—not black—jackets split open, the way they spill their guts, black juice […]
The board’s tidy squares once reassuring, now gone, this game they’d been playing nightly, (Mom points to an empty spot on the shelf) the ups, the downs, muted pinks and the blues. This game they’d been playing nightly, “to keep him sharp,” she offers, the downs, ups, muted pinks and blues, those thumb-rubbed tiles and […]
Oh yes, I believed in rewards, white steeds, crossed fingers. But now? Give me the moon’s agitation, its fits and starts, its hoodwinking heart. See how it pretends to finish, only to rub out the canvas and invent itself again. Clouds do not stay still; the seasons are not idle. What good has patience done […]
Elizabeth Volpe talks about how she came to write poetry.