Bowl, Elizabeth Cook’s first collection, expresses a dynamic passivity in which openness to the weight and texture of experience is met by containment. A central sequence traces the pressure which a grievous passage of family history continues to exert on later generations.
“These poems speak with the immediacy and fierce honesty of recorded thoughts. Exploring the world for the small gestures, the real details that act as revelation, she is both a celebrant and a custodian of memory. Her vision is eloquent and profoundly humane.”
Martha Kapos
“These are poems that combine boldness and honesty of thought with remarkable delicacy of expression, facing the fullness of experience with a stubborn, patient accuracy that never forgets that the world comes in touching, precise detail. Elizabeth Cook has a very distinctive style, almost a prose-writer’s thoroughness, but forced into poetry, so to speak, by its intensity and brevity. I am put in mind of Marianne Moore, but Cook is tougher than Moore…”
D.M. Black