Given Words

​"I do not know when I have read a more moving cycle of poems of loss. And yet they are not confined to loss, of course. They are as large as love, as the histories of families, as the rough and smooth parts in every story. They are huge.”

          - Naomi Shihab Nye, author of more than 35 books and winner of the Wallace Stevens Award for Lifetime Achievement and the National Book Critics Circle Award

“There is a quality of voice in these plainly, carefully spoken poems that’s not unlike taking a long, solitary walk on a bitter, snowy night. In an immense white silence, Elizabeth White Olsen’s voice steps carefully onto the simple surfaces, and finding them brittle, she falls through to the depths, and in the manner of one who wants very badly to arrive at the next warm place, poem by poem, she keeps walking.” (Kathleen Peirce, poet; winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship).

“Elizabeth White makes magical images. At first they appear primitive, but this is deceptive, for the simplicity is a counterpoint to a psychological investigation of her subjects. The space in her prints is like Giotto’s space in his frescos: compressed yet full of imagery and emotion. A purity comes from this compression in much the same way that a purity arises through the spare, simplified style of her writing." (George Krause, photographer and author; winner of the Guggenheim and Prix de Rome Fellowships and two-time winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship).

In this poetry collection, Elizabeth White Olsen records the loss of three family members. She explores grief in spare language that carries us through to new understanding and strength, where healing awaits.

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