Blue Yodel

Ansel Elkins was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Believer, Oxford American, Parnassus, and others. She lives in Greensboro, NC.

Return the howl to its wolfReturn the shovel to the barn, the rope to the horse’s stableResurrect the dark from its heart housed in terror  Reenter the night through its door of mercy  —from “Reverse: A Lynching”“Reading these poems, I think of the photographs of Diane Arbus. . . . The poetry of Blue Yodel is not easy. It presents uncomfortable truths and leaves us to wrestle with them on our own. In the course of that wrestling, we learn a lot about what we know versus what we’d prefer not to know.”—Carl Phillips, from the Foreword“Ansel Elkins’s writing is spare, musical, and sophisticated, and it anchors her powerful imagination, her phantasmagoric landscapes and stories, her wild figurations, her Southernism, and her moral ardor. These are poems poised by the discipline of the mind and perfected by the restlessness of the spirit.”—Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of 3 Sections: Poems“A wonderful piece of work. Big, complicated, and with language that sings. I found myself waking up with stanzas repeating in the back of my head.”—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina