Vanishing Below the Waist
Winner of the Heartland Review Chapbook contest, finalist in the Wolfson Press Chapbook Competition & Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Contest, semi-finalist for Yellow Arrow Publishing’s Chapbook Contest, shortlisted for Galileo Press Chapbook contest, & longlisted for The Rachel Wetzseon Chapbook Award.
“…a portrait of slow muting, of unfeeling and haunt. Each small vignette is a window into a life of macabre observation, quiet apathy, numbed survival and rage, dotted with moments of tenderness.”
-Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan
“With Vanishing Below the Waist, Ellie White eloquently gives voice to frequently silenced medical conditions that can be faced by people with vaginas, such as dyspareunia, vulvodynia, and endometrioma. Vanishing Below the Waist provides a brave and unflinching portrayal of living in a body that’s riddled with question. These poems defy patriarchally constructed notions of shame without ever feeling preachy or pedantic. With elegant lyricism and spellbinding imagery, White’s poems dazzle as much as they rage; they glitter and burn, sing pretty and haunt.”
-Stevie Edwards, author of Quiet Armor
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and for too long after
“A red bird calls, but it is portent of breaking. Or is it talisman? Is it the sound of something that trills inside our chests? In the world of Ellie White’s poems, wind-chimes are dismembered and the weights taken out of pendulum clocks. Death sits in the kitchen with a Red Woman. Children fold themselves into paper dolls, wanting to disappear into the furniture or be borne away on a current of wind. Poems are welts that hold the memory of what happened there. But perhaps they might also be seen as experiments in the making of “[e]very movement, every breath, [as] an act of trust.”
–Luisa A. Igloria, author of The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
“Ellie White’s new work contains what must be described as a searing beauty. Her grasp of how people live with incalculable difficulties is realized through language that is as memorable as a burn. Daily life requires that we abide both the strange intricacy of being a self as well as the endless list of external forces arrayed against us. Here is a book that can help us remain buoyant in spite of all that would weigh us down.”
–Tim Seibles, author of Fast Animal
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Drift
“The beach at night
rolls into itself, blue into black.
My mother hates swimming,
yet here she is, emerging from darkness
in a damp, red one-piece.
Her hair long, like it was before
I existed. Come she says.
The water feels so good.
She’s right. When I slip in,
I barely feel myself drown. “
Price: $7 plus shipping
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Requiem for a Doll
“What is the appeal of the miniature, of the simulacrum? What does the dollhouse reveal in its cut-away display of room upon connecting room with Victorian wallpaper, tiny utensils, a roast in the oven, teardrop chandeliers? In this chapbook, Ellie White takes us inside domestic spaces to show us a landscape of wild and disjointed nature, against and in which girlhoods unfurl and develop. In these sharply chiseled, dream-like poems, we’ll find that though “Even heaven gets wrecked,” there is a kind of beauty in detritus: in dried husks and fur of wild things, winged knick knacks of glass, dust mites that die “considerately, / leaving their exoskeletons to replace the polyester.” Requiem for a Doll gathers the strange and mismatched fragments, the things that have become unmade, and makes out of them a blessing: “May every dress be your favorite midnight/ blue… each shoe nestled gently/ with its mate… / a pair of small warm hands/ that will never set you down.”
-Luisa A. Igloria, author of Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press)
“In Requiem for a Doll Ellie White guides us through the surreal landscape of girlhood to sexual awakening. These startling poems read like small blood offerings; they swell with visceral candor and fang-sharp awareness assuring us readers that beauty, too, can be inherited from all we have lost.”
-Rachel McKibbens, author of Into the Dark and Emptying Field (Small Doggies Press, 2013).