Premonitions
An intimate look at a woman on the verge who is in tune with her body and nature.
Visceral and brimming with vitality, the poems in Premonitions reverberate with the voice of a woman on a secluded farm, confronting her emotional and physical isolation. Drawing on her own experience as a daughter of a third-generation fruit farmer, Elizabeth Schmuhl gives readers a fresh and powerful perspective on what it means to be alive.
Layering one upon another, the poems blur boundaries and create a volatile state out of which the remarkable and unexpected occur. Embracing chaos, change, and unpredictability, these poems are energetically charged and infused with succinct, imagistic language. They reach beyond the constraints assigned to the female form and examine a place where time, the body, sexuality, and the natural world are not fixed. At times surreal, at others painfully real, the poems in Premonitions are the expression of a human life that merges and melds with the world around it, acting and reacting, loving and despairing, disintegrating and rebuilding. The speaker travels fluidly between strata of the natural world and her own body. Adding to the complexity of her poems, Schmuhl creates additional layers of meaning as the poems and their titles relate to the author's synesthesia, a sensory phenomenon through which letters and numbers are experienced as colors and emotions.
Premonitions will turn the reader inward, encouraging the examination of the small details of life and a growing acceptance of the perpetual turmoil and uncertainty of existence despite our own desire to find a firm footing. This volume will be prized by lovers of contemporary poetry and literature alike.
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Elizabeth Schmuhl is a multidisciplinary artist whose work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Paper Darts, PANK, Hobart, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She has worked at various nonprofits, including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and currently works at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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 "Southern Indiana Review"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 "Border Crossing"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 "Emerging Writers Network"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 "Queen Mob's Teahouse"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 "The Fanzine"
