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ABOUT A MAP OF EVERY UNDOING

Alicia Elkort’s arresting suite of poems makes magic by complicating survivor archetypes and superimposing the author’s journey of healing onto her inventive recreations of mythic figures. A Map of Every Undoing rips through Elkort’s girlhood memories with an unflinching intensity, re-assembling her life history in a hard-earned act of self-love. These poems are defiant in their vulnerability, daring readers to look away at the same time they compel us to continue.

PRAISE FOR A MAP OF EVERY UNDOING

“A Map of Every Undoing tends its wounds with meticulous prosody—a dazzling display of language and voluminous vulnerability, each poem in Elkort’s collection is as much a bounty on the tongue as it is a feast for the collective hurts hungering in all of us. “I am safe in the no-/where” Elkort writes, “this soft chapel”, but these poems are never nowhere—they embody every every, clattering against the reverb of physical, emotional, and spiritual harms. These poems brandish a bladed wit that is at times both for and despite its readers, threading together a tapestry of what is most profoundly human: resilience, resistance, and the slant light of self-love.”
—Dr. Diamond Forde, author of Mother Body

“Nimble, vivid, and energetic.”
—Eric Pankey, author of Augury and Crow-Work

“Each of Elkort’s lines is so freighted with anguish and a serrated grace that I want to quote her repeatedly. Though these poems move through rot and rage, they are alchemized into a thriving survival that so poignantly, and pointedly, ask, Who am I to speak of beauty? Who am I not to?”
—Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos and Orange Crush

“Alicia Elkort’s dazzling debut, A Map of Every Undoing, offers both lovesong to the strength of women and girls and healing balm for those who’ve been abused, bullied, unacknowledged, unsung, or unloved. These poems are lithe and robust at once, filled with wisdom, care, and patience of a true healer. I love this collection completely.”
—Jenn Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal and River Woman, River Demon

“If part of healing is a search for form, then Alicia Elkort’s collection A Map of Every Undoing twines this personal search with its lyrical mirror-partner, laying out new paths of feeling over broken sidewalks of sonnets, prose poems, elegies, and dreams. “O / broken sidewalk / your windows are open,” as she says in the first poem. The book moves from unsettling trouble toward a lush and quiet joy, or at least a series of questions about joy. Elkort’s poems begin in experience but, through inquiry, move to new places in the mind.”
—Ed Skoog, author of Mister Skylight, Rough Day, and Run the Red Lights

“With a language unpretentious and unapologetic…this book is more than a map of placement that tells us where we are. Alicia Elkort offers a map of search and possibilities; an invitation to explore all the places where we could be, the core of who we are.”
—Mariano Zaro, author of Decoding Sparrows

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alicia Elkort is a poet, writer, and Life Coach. Her poems have been nominated thrice for the Pushcart, twice for Best of the Net and once for the Orisons Anthology, and her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She was born under the New Mexican sky and has returned to live amongst the juniper and pine where each day she is renewed by the still-life of blue and cloud. For more news and press, visit Alicia’s website. or find her online at @AliciaElkort.