The Errant Thread, chosen by Eavan Boland, Kore Press First Book Award
Through the use of nuanced observation, rich language, and an original voice, Elline Lipkin explores contemporary womanhood, the concerns of travel, cross-cultural themes and family legacy. Recalling the feminist themes of Adrienne Rich, the steely resolve of Sylvia Plath, and the feeling for loss and spliced cultural heritage that Eavan Boland expresses, this work serves as the next link in a lineage of women poets.
In poems such as "Response to Miss Havisham" and "Ars Poetica With Lines by Dickinson" the poet responds to her foremothers within the world of literature. Yet in poems such as "Rara Avis" and "At the Corner of Sunset and Morningside" she places herself uniquely within her own landscape, at her own desk, and in her own voice. Other poems such as "My Parents Meet at La Grande Place," or "My Grandfather's Last Bird" connect language and family as a fractured heritage, one that has allowed for "a split of words, a splice of vows," as the poet writes in "Sweet Asylum."
“The Errant Thread is a volume of wonderful fits and starts: well-built narratives are suddenly interrupted by a cryptic epithalamion. Short lines ease into spacious distances and big, ambling-paced arguments. An epigram suddenly grows a long neck and becomes an elegy. A lyric shears off into a one-line ending… There is real verve, real invention and, above all, true craft… showing what the reader most wants — a poet certain of the craft, a writer certain of what the craft is there to do.”
— Eavan Boland
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“Emily Dickinson, Miss Havisham, The Woman Without Hands from the Grimm fairy tale.. ghost the cites these artful narratives inhabit. In these elegantly posed poems, New York, Paris and Brussels are capitals of longing, possibility, love and doubt, and on these maps Lipkin’s memorable voice inscribes itself in time.” — Mark Doty
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“Robert Frost said we enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Lipkin’s poems will give you a stick with which to climb mountains, walk through gracious parks and will steady you as you talk out the mind’s doubts.” — Cynthia Macdonald
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“Ah, what an amazing book, filled with unexpected diction & classical anger & magical studies & elegant sadness & words that sent me running to my dictionary. Elline Lipkin is a great poet. I am her new constant reader. — Sherman Alexie