Elly Bookman grew up in downtown Atlanta and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Since 2013, she has worked as an educator while consistently publishing her poetry in some of the most widely read markets in the country, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Poetry Review. She was the recipient of the first annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review and the Loraine Williams poetry prize from The Georgia Review. She teaches middle and high school at The Paideia School in Atlanta.
“What’s so wonderful about this book is the gorgeous precision of its grieving. Love Sick Century works like a slow boil on a flame made out of a sublime capacity for seeing the awful truths inside the worst of us. I mean, Bookman has this capacity, giving Love Sick Century this simmering quality that’s so rare these days it seems almost otherworldly. In poem after poem, Bookman’s keen-eyed speaker shows us what it feels like to be mesmerized by dismay. She looks unflinchingly at what the podcasters and pundits call “our current moment”—”dozens dead again.” She says in one poem: “doom, doom, doom”—and takes the horror there quite personally. That wounding makes the beautiful song that is this beautiful book.”
~Adrian Blevins, author of Status Pending
“Elly Bookman’s Love Sick Century is a heartbreaker of a book. Heartbreaking because it is so tender and true. Heartbreaking because it is of this world and this century. Bookman is a poet of insight in our not always insightful world. I think we are all a little love sick. The fever of being a person can be overwhelming, which is what makes this medicine of a book so important.”
~Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry
For more information on the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award please visit our submissions page. If you have questions, comments, concerns, or would like to request a review copy please e-mail 42 Miles directly.
Thank you for supporting poetry & small presses!
42milespress.com 