Description

Poetry. Nothing needs us / but we need / a lot of reassurance / before we can reassure / those things we thought / we needed that they exist too. (from Hinge) Wayne Koestenbaum writes of these spare lyrics: Clean, clear, cool, quick: Elaine Equi's beautiful epigrams of refusal, entirely contemporary, exist at a blissful remove from the fatiguing. I learn a lot from them about how to live and write. I relish her mystic attentiveness to silence, and to the daily uncanny. She is at once an entertainer and an oracle: a winning combination. Evoking muses both literary-Wang Wei, Lorine Niedecker, Bartlett's Quotations, Frank O'Hara-and pop cultural-Armani, karaoke, shopping, porn-Equi writes poems that refuse to be sentimental while never refusing sentiment. Elaine Equi lives in New York City where she teaches at The New School and The Writer's Voice.