Premonitions

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