New poems, 2020
the broken boat
In her fourth book of poetry, Elza deftly builds a raft of questions to stay afloat amidst the breakage of things.
About the book
The end of a twenty-year marriage mirrors subtler fragmentations in our world. How to survive this loss of meaning, this "wintering through"? The intricacies of light, nature, water, absences glint through grief to astonish and lift the heart into understanding again; transforming and coupling the deeper self with the soulful eros/ions of our world.
Blurbs
In the broken boat, Daniela Elza explores the unraveling of a relationship as it is truly experienced: not a tidy narrative of good and bad, but an undulating, multifaceted journey through grief, with no real beginning or end. These poems shatter and shine like river light.
Rob Taylor, author of The News
This brave new collection by Daniela Elza is both lament and praise for the ending of a marriage. The poems, fractured and musical on the page, are at once stark and complex, surreal and familiar. There is a vertiginous sense of unsteady balance, of climbing, rung to rung. And yet, a delicate strength is here - a learning how to move through grief.
Miranda Pearson, author of Rail
the broken boat moves us through the psychological, social and legal ramifications of bodies coming together and coming apart, and Elza's attention to the gravitational tug of metaphors bears witness to the intensities that join us. the broken boat crystallizes the transformational heft of learning how we can be "our own questions' answers."
Kevin Spenst, author of Hearts Amok: A Memoir in Verse
Reviews
A gentle terrier of language
Review by Christopher Levenson.
The British Columbia Review