In Premonitions, Elizabeth Schmuhl not only arrives, but sojourns, seeking to become a physical fact of her own environment, and in turn to translate that environment for us in language both sparse and sumptuous. As she sinks into the isolation of a rural property far from human contact, her language assumes the frayed hemlines and feral tones of her setting. It is lush but lean, whimsical but unsentimental.
~David Nilsen
Elizabeth Schmuhl’s debut collection is a study of life. Within these pages, Schmuhl takes her readers on a journey to a place where nothing is fixed and challenges readers to look inward as she dances through scenes of orchards, streams, a barn, and other images of farm life while moving through space and time, life and death. Schmuhl’s poems are a delight to read with their movement through time and space and wonderful images, but they are also deeply profound in the way that they speak to the soul of her readers to make us all remember who we truly are, where we come from, and that we are all connected in spirit and in life.
~Lizziegh Enos
Schmuhl's poems are quick-hitting, but long-lasting. Reading this collection made us want to spend more time outside, to roll around in the dirt, to grow things, to get up and dance (and we do not EVER want to dance).
~Dan Wickett
This poetry is very much of the earth. Its got dirt under its fingernails. The narrator and the landscape at times seem to meld into one.
~Judson Hamilton
I think Premonitions is about living in real life, feeling disconnected from all the surrounding life, and feeling comfortable with and becoming part of the earth. Offerings of bodies are made to the earth: the speaker’s body, the body of a slaughtered dove, still bloody and beating. Berries are smeared on the flesh bodies get covered with leaves. There is a loneliness that rings through the collection, a desire to disappear from the present form and become enmeshed with the natural and the wild.
~Alexandra Naughton
Premonitions accumulates a haunting record of a speaker subsumed into the necessary madness of nature, a nature whose cycles of proliferation and death, the rhythms of day and night and those of the seasons, constitute a psychic and bodily drama staggeringly rendered through Schmuhl's lyric voice. These are poems of isolation and the spirit of place, and there is no question that they make an important contribution to the regional literatures of the Midwest as well as the vibrant canons of contemporary poetry and lyric prose at large.
~Ryo Yamaguchi, Author of the Refusal of Suitors
Premonitions is a collection by a poet we've waited to read, and who's both come to us in these meditations softly and with unforgettable force. Elizabeth Schmuhl is a poet of deceptive subtlety, so this is a book one will return to over and over again—as one does to each line and each page—to discover further depths, to re-appreciate an image, to be startled by the power of these musical discoveries. Like songs, like spells, like prayers, like ghosts glimpsed in the corner of an eye, we are alarmed and charmed and changed by this poetry. This poet has transformed experience into substance and then transformed that substance into breath and dream. This collection is the debut of an important new voice.
~Laura Kasischke, Author of the Infinitesimals
There's an orchard in these poems. And a river. A farmhouse. Ghosts. Ants and birds and coyotes. Somewhere off in the distance is a lake. There is a body dancing in and through these places and these poems. It contains an imagination that explodes outward, even as it gently brings everything inside. There is no one way to summarize these evocative Premonitions: you can only read your way into them, then stop and savor the place you've come to. I know of nothing else like them.
~Keith Taylor, Author of the Bird-While (Wayne State University Press, 2017)
Poem after brilliant poem bears witness to the collapse of the boundaries between her body and the land that surrounds it. Like the river winding through this book, Schmuhl remakes herself before our eyes. Premonitions is a reminder that in our modern era of distraction, our bodies always have a place in the world of ten thousand things.
~Tomás Morin, Author of Patient Zero
