Poetry, 2013. With an introduction by Aislinn Hunter.
milk tooth bane bone
Daniela Elza's milk tooth bane bone is a book that sweeps across the reader's consciousness like a bird's wing.
About the book
The poems do something rather miraculous: fragmentary yet narrative, grounded yet mythic, they deconstruct and build simultaneously, forge and empty out meanings and images.
The landscapes and leitmotifs - crows, trees, winter, stories - that accompany us through the book work like refrains in a Wagnerian opera to give us a sense of both the transitory and the unchanged. Crows shape-shift their way through the paradoxes of language, personal mythology and poetic ecology, through landscapes and histories that, like the crows themselves, refuse to be tamed. These are poems that live wild alongside and within us; poems that suggest a way to place ourselves within our own mythologies, invite us to articulate our own way of being.
With an introduction by Aislinn Hunter.
Blurbs
Black words swooping across the snowy field, rips or tears in the fabric of space, the dark-winged protagonists in these pages are splintered shards of the self haunting the branches. Out of the ache of the present moment, Daniela Elza has crafted something spare and irresistible, an open armature for wonder.
David Abram, author of Becoming Animal
Daniela Elza's milk tooth bane bone is a lyrical testimony to the poet-philosopher's daily commitment to attentive wonder, heart-infused wisdom, and embodied courage, all devoted to the pedagogy of being and becoming in a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Like the crows she writes about from countless perspectives, Daniela opens up possibilities for words that startle me with new insights and hopes. When I read Daniela's poems, my mouth and heart and imagination all open up with a jaw-dropping shout of jouissance!
Dr. Carl Leggo, Department of Language and Literacy Education, UBC
Reviews
Gaps and Gravity: Daniela Elza's milk tooth bane bone
One of the places Elza's poetry takes us is the abiding truth of this: if we have to be truly philosophical / we will not say / a word. Elza recognizes not only the power of words and the shape of language, but the strength of the silence in between.
Al Rempel in Arc Poetry MagazineReview by Katie Stobbart
It is a book you live with, you eat with, you walk to work with, and each time you take something new from it.
Katie Stobbart, The CascadeReview by Michael Dennis
Elza's milk tooth bane bone is almost elemental in its purity. You hardly notice, at first, that these apparently fragmentary passages read with a clear narrative, insight and enlightening conclusions.
Michael DennisMedia
crow morphologies
A six-track CD collaboration with Soressa Gardner, featuring poems from milk tooth bane bone.
Open audiocrow morphologies: at.tension
The videopoem, recorded in collaboration with Soressa Gardner, is an official selection of the 2013 Visible Verse Festival at the Cinematheque in Vancouver. It is based on the third track of crow morphologies.
Open video